I was watching a news-oriented talk show, and one of the guests made a claim about healthcare in this country.  It was a factual claim, and a controversial one, and she made it very authoritatively, but the host did not believe her.  “Come on,” he said.  “That can’t be right.”

“You can Google it yourself!” she told him.  “I’m sure there are people with their iPhones right here in the audience googling it right now.”  The camera didn’t show the studio audience, but I imagined dozens of little screens lighting up and dozens of (tens of dozens?) or fingers rapidly tapping out search terms.

But would those fingers find and those screens show?  Try googling any even somewhat controversial claim (global warming, immigration reform, pick your topic), and you’ll find thousands and thousands of bits of information–some accurate, some objective, some factual, some polemic, some funny, some dishonest–the whole wide range.

“To google” is a verb (and, sure, it includes Bing and all the other search engines), and talk-show guests aren’t the only ones who will tell you to “just google it” (or they may even throw another word in there–like in the page that the picture of Bart Simpson above links to–sorry about that link.  I didn’t choose the language!).  But there’s more than just googling involved.

If Google is the massive collective brain, with all the information of the universe stored in it (and I’m not sure that’s exactly what it is), then it also includes all the junk and garbage that we all keep (maybe longer than we should) in our own individual brains.  Lyrics to songs you used to like in third grade, the best way to unwrap a Tootsie Roll, the hate-letter you wrote to someone who annoyed you on the subway–it’s all there, along with the exact population of Tallahassee, Florida and the military expenditures of Zimbabwe and the complete works of Jane Austen and a very good recipe for paella.

“Google-Fu” (like “Kung-Fu,” right?) is a skill of self-defense and even of attack–it’s the true power today.  Just entering a search term like “global warming” isn’t a skill, it’s not even really something that should be called searching.  And taking that first link on the results page is even less of a skill.  Setting up a search, refining the results.  If your google-fu is truly strong, you can get the real result, the right result, quickly and efficiently.  And you can know the result you’ve got is the best one and be able to explain why.

But how do we teach people these skills? There aren’t google-fu academies, and while some schools (particularly libraries) do their best to help students with these skills, others just try to prevent or limit what students do with that massive collective brain.  It seems that the secrets of searching, of learning how to ask, are too often shared just by word-of-mouth.  Or not shared at all.  Can we change that? Should we?

For those of us in the education field (well, you’re in the education field, too, but from another side), there’s been a lot of talk over the years about learning styles.  Most of this talk originates with the landmark study from 1999, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School.  That study drew heavily on Howard Gardner’s earlier (1983) work on Multiple Intelligences, and it served an important purpose because (at least to some extent) there was a prevailing view that everyone could, or should, learn in pretty much the same way.  If students weren’t learning in the style that was taught, it was because they were just not very capable of learning (I’m doing some exaggerating here).

We’ve come a long distance since then, and it has pretty much become part of accepted common sense that different people learn in different ways, and that teaching should work to support those different styles.  And those styles have become codified, and in fact turned into a bit of an industry, which classes students into their various learning styles, and prescribes teaching techniques to help meet those styles.

The definitions of the specific styles vary somewhat, but the general outline that is used most often defines these seven styles (sometimes the names vary, sometimes there are less than seven):

• Visual (spatial). You prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.
• Aural (auditory-musical). You prefer using sound and music.
• Verbal (linguistic). You prefer using words, both in speech and writing.
• Physical (kinesthetic). You prefer using your body, hands and sense of touch.
• Logical (mathematical). You prefer using logic, reasoning and systems.
• Social (interpersonal). You prefer to learn in groups or with other people.
• Solitary (intrapersonal). You prefer to work alone and use self-study.

You can find all kinds of graphs and charts on the web about how these relate, and what teachers can do to help determine which styles their students are using and how to help them.  If a student is an aural learner, you’d better not try to get him to understand a text by reading it silently! Students who are social learners should be working in groups, and if they’re physical, too, it’s a good idea to have them moving around the room or manipulating objects.

You can even find some tests or quizzes online which let you determine your own learning style.  Now, I think that these are not very useful for any real analysis (for that you need to have a real study with interviews and multiple evidence, not just a few questions on a website).  But they can be a bit funny and entertaining (like those facebook quizzes: “What kind of underwear are you?” or “What Hollywood movie is most like your life?”).  There’s one fairly good one here, but they are all over the web (be cautious–some of them will want you to enter your email address, and send you plenty of spam afterwards).

But when I tried one of these recently, I got these scores (out of a possible score of 20 for each):

• Visual 3
• Social 0
• Physical 3
• Aural 1
• Verbal 1
• Solitary 3
• Logical 3

I seem to be a little bit of everything (except social) but not much of anything (remember, 20 would be considered a high score on this scale–I didn’t score over 3 on any category).

I think, really, that these learning styles might be present in everyone all the time, and it’s a matter of degree, or individual context, or even time of day or season of the year, rather than being real permanent or definitive traits.  Sometimes, in fact, I’m social and want to be with other people when I’m learning.  Sometimes I like to dance or whistle or sing while I’m studying, while other times I like to learn by sitting and thinking quietly–or thinking while I drive or work on restoring an antique radio.

What about you? Do you have a learning style that is singular? Or multiple styles? And…can you connect this to culture(s)?  And is/are there (a) teaching style(s) to connect to your learning style(s) (those parentheses and slashes do get awkward, don’t they? :-)).

Some years ago, when I was teaching at a different CUNY school, a colleague and I were having students work on multimedia projects (in two different kinds of classes).  We thought we noticed that these projects deepened student learning in interesting ways, and we collaborated on a project to investigate how this was working and why.  (If you’re interested, you can see some of the progress of that investigation on the website we created, “Looking at Learning: Looking Together“).

There’s really just one part of that project that I want to emphasize for this unit, though.  In our investigation, my colleague and I found that we both shared a strong belief, really an assumption, that when students became aware of their own learning, it made that learning stronger and more permanent.  We both believed that it was a good thing to push students to reflect on what they learned in class or through a specific project.  We liked to have them look at their work, while they were doing it, and after they were finished, and write about what they were learning or what they had learned from that work.  We wanted them to look in the mirror by looking at their work, and see how that looking changed them.  In fact, we felt this so strongly that we even used the same principle in our own work, our own teaching.  We not only taught, but we talked and wrote about our teaching, and we believed, and we found, that that reflecting made our teaching better.  It deepened our understanding of what we were doing and it led us to make more conscious choices about how we were teaching.

This kind of reflecting is called “meta-learning.”  It’s learning (or thinking) about learning.  And “going meta” is an important part of what many teachers are beginning to value.  This is critical thinking, in some ways–but for students it’s sometimes not required or requested, even though they may do it anyway.  In this course, certainly, we’re doing plenty of it.  It’s sort of the theme of the course, learning about learning.  But how often do you do this in your other classes? How often do you take a moment (or more) to reflect, to think about what and how you’ve learned (or whether you’ve learned).  And do you share that reflection? Maybe with friends informally?

In most classes you’re probably asked to fill out an evaluation at the end of the course–and research shows that for most students if you ask them to fill out the evaluation after the first five minutes, or after the whole semester, the results are really pretty much the same.  Most students take that evaluation as a chance to say whether or not they liked the professor and the course, and many times that decision is already made very early in the class (a sobering thought for us professors on the first day of class!).

There’s nothing really wrong with that, in my view.  But I do wonder what we could get from a deeper evaluation, a more reflective evaluation, which students do by themselves, for themselves, and about themselves.  That might or might not be an effective tool for assessing the course or the professor.  But it might be a stellar tool for helping the student to direct and understand and deepen her own learning.  Possibly?