The Kept-Up Academic Librarian links to an article—published by Educause, the higher-education technology group—that offers insight into the practice of "Google jockeying." A Google jockey, the article explains, is a student who asks to spend a class session surfing the Web for sites related to the topics at hand. (The jockey’s searches appear on a screen visible to the entire class.)
Lecturers who bristle at the sight of laptops in the classroom probably won’t be rushing to appoint their own Google jockeys. But some professors may want to consider the practice, Educause argues, because it plays to students’ natural inclination toward multitasking:
Students want to be constantly exposed to multiple sources of input. Google jockeying takes what otherwise would be private, back-channel communication and makes it available to the entire class, trasnforming an individual activity into one that benefits the group.
But mileage may vary, even from one lecture to the next, as the article points out: "The skill of the Google jockey has a considerable bearing on the usefulness of the exercise."
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