Week 3 of Digital Footprints was about digital citizenship. As part of the discussions, our presenter, Scott Monahan, suggested that we google our names to investigate what our online presence looks like. I had a student teacher a few years who told me she had googled me before beginning her student teaching with me. She had nothing but complimentary things to say, but I was taken aback. Obviously it's a quick way to get background on someone, but I had never considered that anyone would do this on me.
Many, many pages were available when I googled my name. There are a few other people with my name, as is to be expected, but a lot of the results are actually me. There are links to sites I belong to, like Facebook and Twitter, one for my school web page, several YouTube videos of music performances that I played in, my father-in-law's obituary, an article I wrote a few years ago, and every comment I ever made on numerous blogs. Doing this reminded me of several places that I no longer wanted to be, so I took the opportunity to remove myself. I also found myself on a few sites that I had never heard of -- these seem to be entities that collect information from people's digital footprints in order to sell this information. That explains some of the emails I had been getting at work. I was able to remove myself from one of these.
As I looked further I found myself on Picasa and Flicker. The strangest place I found myself was on a blog called Blonde Research where a video of Mozart piece I played in a few years ago was posted. In fact, all the YouTube videos of performances had migrated to other sites, none of which I had heard of.
It was an interesting experience. Overall, my digital footprint is positive, but it is a little disturbing to find out that I am being seen and heard in places that I had of. I'd be interested to hear what other people find when they google themselves.
Not being informed is what concerns me. Ideally, I would prefer to be asked to be included as part of a site, rather than sites having carte blanche to link our info. Inability to place parameters that hold fast has been a dilemma from the beginning of public use of the WEB.
ReplyDeleteI too found this to be an interesting exercise. Most of the pages related to my former place of employment and the many workshops, presentations and projects that I was part of. Some were newspaper articles from the early 80's when I was on a school board. It was strange seeing those articles again.
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