The other day, I was driving to work and got stopped at a red light as I'm turning onto Huron Church. Those who have made this trip know that this can be a long wait.
I'm sitting behind a big transport truck and the mind starts to ponder the wonders of the universe. At first, I'm wondering how much carbon monoxide I'm inhaling from the exhaust but then I noticed that both of us had our turn signals on. We were both turning left and my turn signal was, visually, perfectly aligned with the truck but I noticed that they weren't both flashing at the same time.
They weren't flashing on the same cycle either. So, in anticipation, I kept watching until they both flashed at the same time and wondered how long they would be in synch. It was for just one flash and then they were off in different cycles again.
For that one moment though, they clicked.
Time goes forward and I'm logged onto my email and reading the overnight messages and the news groups that appear in my mail as well. One of the messages was from a David Dillard and dealt with a new service from Google Labs called Google Coop - Custom Search Engines. I'm doing at presentation at the Western RCAC's Symposium in December so I figure I'd give it a look and see what this is all about. I can sum up my reaction in two words.
Holy cow!
Using this utility, you can create your own subset of Google for a particular purpose. It's Saturday morning and the coffee is hot so I figure I'd give it a shot. Before long, I've got my Custom Search Engine live, online, and also a link to it from the GEC Computers in the Classroom home page. Not only can you put a link to it, but you can actually embed the code right in the page. I'm so impressed with the ease, to be sure, but the possibilities are endless. You can read about what my Custom Search Engine does later in this newsletter.
I can't let a success like this go unrecognized so I post back the newsgroup how easy and successful this venture was and recognize Mr. Dillard's efforts. After all, he started me down this path.
Within moments of my post, I receive an email back from Mr. Dillard. Over the next back and forth, I find out that he's a research librarian at Temple University. Until now, my knowledge and contact with Temple was restricted to knowing that Bill Cosby went there and that they have a great basketball program. Mr. Dillard also moderates a newsgroup on Yahoo Groups called Net-Gold. Like most good listservs, you can subscribe to it and all of the content has been archived here.
A few more emails back and forth and the ideas for the use of Custom Search Engines literally explode in my mind. If you're doing a research unit on bugs or the Second World War, create your own Custom Search Engine. Direct the students to your personal URL and they can search and get legitimate results rather than going onto the wild and woolly internet.
The detractors will talk about the need to be discriminating users of information. This is correct and there's a time and place for this. Just like Webquests make efficient use of the internet for a targeted project, so does a Custom Search Engine for research. Moreover, your Custom Search Engine allows you to have collaborators add their own links to your engine. Talk about your cooperative unit planning.
Teacher-librarians can unite under this new technology. It adds another tool to their arsenal to support research and the understanding of knowledge and how to integrate it into the regular research routine.
The possibilities of this are endless. I would encourage you to try it out. You'll be amazed at the ease and the possibilities.
I'm also happy to report that David Dillard also scoped out the GEC Computers in the Classroom website and we made an entry in his Net-Gold list!
All of this because for that one moment, David's and my lights flashed together.
