The first part of this assignment, looking at the images that came up with specific terms, was fairly simple, if time consuming. There were some general findings that I was expecting; for example, there were more Caucasians than visible minorities in all of the photos. However, some of the findings did surprise me a bit. When looking up ‘professor’, most of the photos were of males (not a surprise); what was a surprise were the photos of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, movie characters such as the Nutty Professor and Mary Poppins, as well as a photo of the Professor from Gilligan’s Island.
When I looked up ‘teacher’, most of the photos were of females. What was a surprise here is that there were also photos of Justin Trudeau and the main character from Bad Teacher. The photos of ‘leader’ were mainly Caucasian males. They also included photos of Canadian political leaders such as Justin Trudeau, Elizabeth May, Jagmeet Singh, Steven Harper, Thomas Mulcair, and Patrick Brown. What was surprising with this search is that most of the pictures were cartoons, not photos. The search for ‘doctor’ was almost gender balanced and had the greatest percentage of visible minorities (21%). The surprise photos here featured Doctor Strange, Barack Obama, and, most surprising, Mr. T. The search for ‘nurse’ had the second greatest percentage of visible minorities (17%) and the greatest percentage of females (97%). The surprise inclusion in this set of photos was Darrnell Nurse, an NHL player.
The last three categories, boy, girl, and teenager, also had some interesting results. For one thing, 5% of all photos in the ‘boy’ search were of girls, but only 0.5% of photos in the ‘girl’ category were of boys. Under the ‘boy’ category, 3% of the boys pictured had significant deformities and there were no boy characters from movies. For the search for ‘girl’, I was glad that I had Safe Search on, as there were many girls in skimpy clothing and sexy poses. There were also several female movie characters featured: Katniss (Hunger Games) and Catwoman (Dark Knight Rises). The ‘teenager’ search also featured more females than males (55% female). What was surprising about this last search is that there were a number of ‘Teenager posts” included, such as: 
There were also photos dealing with teen pregnancy, relationship violence, parental issues, and relational issues. The two surprises here were photos of Sumo wrestlers and a photo of Kylo Ren (Star Wars: The Force Awakens). Again, I was glad I had Safe Search on.
The second part of this activity was a challenge. I was familiar with Alan November‘s work, having used this same activity with my students two years ago. (However, now that I am at a new school, I want to try it there as well. Maybe I can catch them the same way I caught my students at my last school). I was also somewhat familiar with the Google Advanced Search operators (but not this particular form). Because I was familiar with these documents, I did not think I would have big issues with the advanced search activity. I thought that until I started the first project: academic articles from Canadian universities on the topic of leadership. As this was a search for academic articles, I thought I’d start with Google Scholar. From there I tried ‘leadership’ with several operators (site:edu, site:ac, site:edu.ca, site: edu OR location:CA). These various attempts did not lead to articles. Then I decided to find a website that gave me a more extensive list of operators. After watching a number of YouTube videos and search through many websites, I finally found this page but it still did not help.
After 15 minutes of fruitless search, I went on to search for the pdf and the podcast. Both were easy to find. For the pdf assignment, I added ‘filetype:pdf’ and for the podcast, I added ‘location:Saskatoon’. Both those searches gave me what I was looking for quickly and so I went back to the academic article search with renewed focus. Since I was still in Google Scholar, I tried to simplify things by just typing in ‘leaders site:.ca’ and I finally found the page I was hoping to find.
The last time I was this frustrated with a web search was when I worked on fine tuning my literature review for my dissertation. I had found a number of articles but now needed specific articles to support very specific points that were newer than the articles I already had. Since it took me 5 years to finish my actual dissertation, a number of articles had now aged out and needed to be replaced with newer research. Most of the search parameters I included just brought up the same articles I already had. I don’t remember exactly which operators I had to use in the advanced search to find them, but I know it took time and creativity (both were in short supply 4 years into the process). I can see this being a source of frustration for many students until they practice more.