Who is Farhan Lalji?

Some University professor down in Brighton wants to ban using search engines and Wikipedia from her corner of Academia. Personally, I think it’s a rotten idea. In this age of information overload you need to be able to cut through and get a good understanding of an issue, event or person as easily as possible. Not to mention I have no idea how you enforce such a ban. After doing some searching I found out that the University professor is peddling a book called, get this “the University of Google”– surprise, surprise, this whole things smells of propaganda to me.

Personally I think access to information by searching and using tools like Wikipedia has revolutionized the way we gather information. Very quickly we can find out basic levels of information on a wider variety of topics.

Use Wikipedia a lot? Do this test, type in en on your browser, click the down arrow and check out the things you’ve looked up recently. My list includes Tao, Albert Einstein, Pete Newell, Petra and Ubuntu, that’s a eastern philosophy, and African philosophy, a genius in physics and a genius in basketball and a location I visited on holiday recently.

The web, and in particular helped me get a basic understanding of these diverse subjects and that’s not a bad thing.  Had I been doing an academic paper on Taoism, or the theory of relativity or whatever else, Wikipedia and search engines would be a starting point not a reference at the end.  After a superficial understanding I can ask the right questions and dig deeper into a subject - that’s what I believe any sensible student of the world would do.

Society and information in society have changed as a result of the internet, as a result of having so much information at our fingertips. What students really need is more courses on how to differentiate the signal from the noise and where to go to get deeper understandings of the subjects they are researching.