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

by Tara Brabazon

Looking at schools and universities, it is difficult to pinpoint when education, teaching and learning started to haemorrhage purpose, aspiration and function. Libraries and librarians have been starved of funding. Teachers cram their curriculum with 'skill development' and 'generic competencies' because knowledge, creativity and originality are too expensive to provide to unmotivated students and parents obsessed with league tables, not learning. Meanwhile, the internet offers a glut of information on everything-under-the-sun, a mere mouse-click away. Bored surfers fill their cursors and minds with irrelevancies. We lose the capacity to sift, discard and judge. Information is no longer for social good, but for sale. Tara Brabazon argues that this information fetish has been profoundly damaging to our learning institutions and to the ambitions of our students and educators. In The University of Google she projects a defiant and passionate vision of education as a pathway to renewal, where research is based on searching and students are on a journey through knowledge, rather than consumers in the shopping centre of cheap ideas. Angry, humorous and practical in equal measure, The University of Google is based on real teaching experience and on years of engaged and sometimes exasperated reflection on it. It is far from a luddite critique of the information age. Tara Brabazon celebrates the possibilities of digital platforms in education, but deplores the consequences of placing funding on technology and not teachers. In doing so, she opens a new debate on how to make our educational system both productive and provocative in the (post-) information age.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

241 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

I am the Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University. I have written 22 books, 11 audiobooks, over 350 refereed articles and book chapters, and over 600 research outputs. I have podcasted since 2008 and vlogged since 2016.

Reviews

[Mary Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up because, firstly, I have been a long-time fan of Tara Brabazon's Youtube videos. Secondly, I read another book of hers, Digital Dieting, and enjoyed it. Thirdly, I'm a teaching assistant struggling with pedagogy in the COVID era when flexibility, and not effectiveness, is the order of the day. Go figure.
Some of Brabazon's points resonate so strongly with me it is not even funny. Lately I have been frustrated by university administrators, exasperated by work-shy students who have been enabled by said admin system and by a broader entitlement culture, and defensive of the worth and value of higher education even as it has been attacked by anti-intellectualism from all political fronts.
So where this book is spot-on, it is truly spot-on. Universities (including professors, librarians, administrators, and students) must understand that managing internet literacies is vitally important: they cannot be either assumed or ignored. The internet can be a useful tool, but it can also be damaging to our abilities to manage and process information (when a Google search is happy to manage that information for us.) The techno-utopian promises of the "online university" can only be born out when they are facilitated by the only thing that has ever facilitated good education: good teachers. Simply nothing will substitute for a good teacher, good scholarship, and an attentive student.
The reason for three stars has more to do with some odd chapters than anything else. I could not, try as I might, follow Brabazon through her chapters on the effect of 9/11 on university education or the chapter on de-globalization. I found them confusing and ill-fitted to the rest of the chapters in the book. But, of course, allow some room for both the age of the book and for user error.
Overall I would recommend it, but I would recommend Digital Dieting more.

[Leonard Houx · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not very well written and organised, but a great picture into the experiences of a teacher who actually cares about what her students learn.

[Hannatorp]

So far this has been a very fruitful reading experience. The book makes you see the relation between technology and pedagogical quality in a clearer light: in many cases the first has been embraced at the expense of the latter. My own observation is that the use of technology, however, is imperative. Not because it's new, and not because it's technology, but because it's a side effect of a much larger, social phenomenon - a paradigm shift taking place in the post-information society. I'm eager to find out how Tara Brabazon is going to get into this later in the book.

[Senga · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a research and learning coordinator at a secondary school I found this take on the Google world enlightening and relevant, particularly the first chapter BA(Google):graduating to information literacy.

And how does this human dynamo manage to spread her magic fairy dust of wonderfulness so far and wide? She gets up at 3am every morning!

[Jaq · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book - but wanted so much more from it. But I am thankful that this text is out there - as a stepping stone for further research.