Well,
it is that time again—the Twilight New
Moon video is now part of our lives. Pre-teen and teenage girls spend
untold amounts of time mooning over Bella and Edward… providing, believe it or
not, a great example of better quality, iterative searching.
Of
the books’ strengths and weaknesses, what annoyed me most wasn’t the endlessly repetitive conversations,
or the thousand uses of the word alabaster,
but rather Bella’s very poor online search skills.
Bella,
the heroine, tricks a member of the local Quileute tribe into telling her about
love interest Edward’s secret:
“’…There are stories of the cold ones…. According to
legend, my own great-grandfather knew some of them. He was the one who made the
treaty to keep them off our land.” He rolled his eyes.
“…’And what are they?”’ I finally asked. ‘What are the cold ones?’
“He smiled darkly.
“’Blood drinkers,’ he replied in a chilling voice.
‘Your people call them vampires.’” (124-126)
In
her agitation over this revelation, Bella naturally decides to hop online to
verify the vampire claim. And that is what she searches: [vampire].
“It took an infuriatingly long time, of course. When
the results came up, there was a lot to sift through—everything from movies and
TV shows to role playing games, underground metal, and gothic costume
companies.
“Then I found a promising site—Vampires A-Z.” (133)
Bella
reads though the site, “looking for anything that sounded familiar, let alone
plausible,” (134) and comes up blank.
Meanwhile,
my mind is fairly screaming, not
about the revelation of Edward’s true identity, but rather about the fact that
her friend gave her a perfectly good, highly specific and potentially powerful,
search term, [cold ones], and it does not even occur to her to use it. By sticking with a more general term,
she not only opens herself up to many irrelevant hits, but fails to uncover
pages that might have information matched to her specific information need.
Like searching for [plant food] when you want to know what to feed your Venus
fly trap. She ends up frustrated by her search process, feeling that it taught
her nothing of use.
By
contrast, movie-Bella has a search style that is worlds stronger.
In
the film, instead of revealing Edward’s hidden identity, Bella’s friend darkly
hints that Edward is somehow related to an old Quileute tribal legend, but
refuses to say more. Bella then undertakes an iterative search process, in which she reads for search terms and folds them back into her search process
to get more specific. In this
example, Bella takes stock of what she knows, and goes online to find a more
information (search: [Quileute legends]). She finds a book on Quileute myths,
and homes in on the term cold one,
which she then takes back online as her next search. Using this specific term,
she finds precise information, which in fact allows her to build a list of
attributes that she has recognized in Edward—speed, strength, and cold skin—and
leverages that knowledge to add new ones—immortal, drinks blood—confirming for
her that Edward is a vampire. A much more successful and satisfying search experience,
if a weaker execution of the plot. This type of iterative searching is one of
the key skills that I teach students, educators, and parents in my classes.
With
the second movie in the Twilight Saga selling
like crazy, and two more to come over the next two years, both the Twilight and the search lovers in your
class can enjoy the opportunity to dig in.
My
take away: No one wants to hear they have to run multiple searches to find
information. So, use something kids do want to hear about to get the point
across!
Do
you have a time you used pop culture to teach a lesson they do not otherwise want
to learn? Please share!
