A friend of mine who just started blogging recently (and has been writing up a STORM) shared a post entitled Anonymity, where art thou? describing how he used the internet to track down somebody that had recently visited his wedding site. Essentially, he found the person’s IP address in his logs, used Geobytes.com to trace it to a general location, compared that to his own recollection of where a friend lived and figured out who the visitor most likely was. His point? It ain’t easy to be anonymous anymore.
It reminded me of something that Friedman wrote in The World is Flat.
Before my daughter Orly went off to college in the fall of 2003, she was telling me about some of her roommates. When I asked her how she knew some of the things she knew - had she spoken to them or received an e-mail from the? - she told me she had done neither. She just Googled them. She came up with stuff from high school newspapers, local papers, etc., and fortunately no police records.
I’m preparing to do an in-service for a few high schools next month and though that I’d share with them some examples of how secondary students are blogging right now. So I did a few quick searches on Xanga and MySpace. It occurred to me to see if I could find any students from the district that I was going to be presenting to. It took me about 30 seconds to find around 20 students. I was astounded by just how much information I could find out about them, including photos that I’m pretty sure aren’t in their family albums.
Do these students realize that their lives are a matter of public record right now? That when a college recruiter or potential employer goes to Google them, this is the sort of thing that they might find?
Principals used to threaten my friends and I with putting our childish stunts into our ‘permanent record’. We laughed because we didn’t really believe in any sort of record that follows you around throughout the rest of your life. Things got put into files and then forgotten.
But the internet doesn’t forget. It’s astounding what you can find out about somebody just by doing a Google search for their name.
My sister is definitely not much of a computer user. She uses email when she has to, but could definitely be considered a digital immigrant with an expired passport. She doesn’t have a blog, doesn’t post in message boards, and certainly never had her own web page. However, two minutes after doing a Google search of her name, I found an article she wrote about Osteoporosis, what colleges she went to, where she lives, and the results from a bazillion different races that she’s been in.
Just imagine the trail that digital natives are leaving behind them. When I interviewed at Discovery, Scott Kinney quoted a podcast of mine from a few months ago and asked me to defend it with respect to the job I was applying for. It definitely took me by surprise.
Are our students prepared for a college interviewer who might ask them to defend the comments they wrote on their blog during their sophomore year? Are college graduates ready to do the same when they apply for jobs?
Without realizing it, students today are creating a far more permanent record than anything we had when we were growing up. And they’re doing it deliberately. They may be doing irreparable damage to their reputation without even realizing it.
This really emphasizes the need for schools to adopt these tools. Educators need to teach students how to use them responsibly and to consider the long term consequences of their actions. The world is changing and if schools don’t adapt to reflect these changes, then we are doing our students a great disservice.
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