The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age

Tara Brabazon, a Professor of Media Studies at Brighton University, is a very angry lady. She is angry about the dumbing down of universities, and in particular, the reliance by both students and management on the use of technological tools such as Google for students undertaking their studies. This wide‐ranging book covers both some particular features of this love of technology (such as use of PowerPoint and podcasts as well as Google) and the pressure that academic managers put on academic staff to employ these tools. She is particularly scathing of the trend towards e learning, arguing fiercely that the last thing that occurs with such programmes is genuine learning, and that learning can only occur in the rich environment of a combination of lectures, readings and tutorials.

I have considerable sympathy with Professor Brabazon's views; I, too, find it frustrating that students expect to learn everything from PowerPoint slides, and do not bother to turn up for lectures. However, the book is poorly argued and is backed up by slap‐dash referencing – something she castigates her own students for. I note some of the errors and misunderstandings below.

The author claims that bibliometrics is “one of the most widely mocked areas in academia”; it may be mocked by some academics (though I doubt many mock it now it will be the basis of future UK research assessment exercises), but it certainly is not mocked by the large number of information scientists in the world. She complains that Google Page Rank ranks sites by popularity, not qualitative importance, but the fact of the matter is that the ranking is remarkably successful at pulling out the key sources in its top output. Has she never heard of the wisdom of crowds? She describes the Web as “unrefereed” despite the fact that a large proportion of materials on Google Scholar and in repositories are refereed. Later she contradicts herself by stating “while some material on the web is refereed, generally the pieces are short and the arguments less developed”, a claim that will cause amazement amongst repository managers and other Open Access proponents. In short, she seems to have no idea about the richness of refereed literature on the Web and comes across as a Luddite who simply dislikes everything electronic. The author claims that flexible learning does not include in its brief teaching with discipline, clarity and precision, without offering any evidence for such an assertion. The author claims that the archetypal bad lecturer uses PowerPoint with a few headings. That's precisely how I lecture, and I get rave reviews from my students

The author thinks that academic freedom means that scholars should own the rights in their lectures. It does not. It means the freedom to express views that may not be popular. She claims in the USA, there is a tradition that faculty “own their own creative written works, with the exception of patents and inventions” – but inventions are not written works. She says “Copyright law is based on a single identifiable author” when multiple authors, and anonymous organisations all can obtain copyright. In all her confusion about copyright, she fails to cite the key source on the topic, Ann Monotti and Sam Ricketson's Universities and Intellectual Property, which would have put her right on so many matters which she has got so wrong.

For someone who castigates her students for not using proper refereed sources, Brabazon references a remarkable number of newspaper articles where scholarly published alternatives were available; she also fails to provide adequate bibliographic citations to many of the scholarly items she cites, making them difficult or impossible to trace; she suggests as a reference Alternatives to Schooling, an obscure work by Ivan Illich, published by the Australian Union of Students and not available in the UK, rather than his much more accessible Deschooling Society.

Another criticism of this book is that it simply does not reflect reality in higher education today. Gone are the days when one could indulge in intensive tutorials with small groups of students, and gone are the days when students focus 100 per cent on their studies to the exclusion of working in bars and shops to earn some money, so it is inevitable that students will want to cut corners to get the necessary grades. I greatly regret this fact, but at least, I accept it to be a fact. The author, in contrast, does not want to recognise the reality.

The author has a clear political stance, with passing references to “the aim must be to present and discuss the assumptions of power and knowledge present in universities”, “when budgets are sunk into hardware and software – rather than paper in the photocopier, equipment in lecture theatres, books, libraries or more places for students – an ideology is configured which values digiware over peopleware”, “it is also odd that this story about student contracts was featured on the first page of The Guardian on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 bombings… an inappropriate story selection and placement” and so on. This stance gets irritating after a while. The author believes that students are not consumers and are not buying an education. I doubt many students would agree. As a minor aside, she gives an incorrect explanation for why British postage stamps do not have the name of the country on it. It is not, as she claims, a throwback to the days that there was an empire, and in any case, contrary to what the author claims, the tradition continues to this day.

The book ends with a select bibliography (with no explanation of why the items are considered important) and a curiously structured index. The author needs to learn how to use scholarly works rather than newspapers, to cite references properly and needs to learn more about Open Access, what Google Scholar covers and recent developments on the Web. She needs to understand that a large proportion of scholarly material is now readily available on the Web. Time and again in the book she extols the virtues of librarians, but seems not to have used them herself in writing this book. All told, despite my sympathy with what the author has to say, the book cannot be recommended.