What’s a “Google Jockey?”
A “google jockey” is the person who finds information–usually from the web–to help support a lesson, lecture, or event. Say a fact is needed to help support understanding–the google jockey hops on to the Internet and finds a fact. Take these three examples:
Example #1: The teacher is describing lunar eclipses to a classroom of students. The google jockey might venture out to search the web to find when the next eclipse will be. This site from NASA might provide the information for when the class would be able to see a lunar eclipse.
Example #2: A group of teachers are at a conference and the current topic is a Ning. The audience wants to know what the word “ning” actually means and where it comes from. The google jockey would find that the founder of Ning, Gina Bianchini, explains its name on the site’s blog. They chose the name “Ning” because it means “peace” in Chinese.
Example #3: A group of musicians are at a meeting to find out about the local happenings in their city, in this instance Beijing. There’s word that The Killers would be coming to town. In order to verify this information a google jockey would go here to Timeout Beijing to find out if it’s true and here to Piao.com for tickets.
during my workshop in Beijing last October, i found out that NING meant peace in Chinese . i am so pleased to know that the name was picked because of its Chinese meaning. we all need more peace on this planet
The concept is great. But the name reinforces the misguided notion in the minds of students, and sadly, way too many educators, that Google is the only source of information on the planet.
Dear Librarian Reply:
October 21st, 2010 at 1:48 pm
Great point Mark. Perhaps we should be calling this person our info seeker or instant classroom researcher.
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