Google Me

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.

Jumping In

When I got an email about the MOOC called DigiFoot12: Exploring our digital footprints together, I decided to sign up. For me this was a plunge into something completely different, (Yes, I am a Monty Python fan!) I had never used Blackboard, where the weekly sessions are taking place, I do not understand Twitter, though I have an account, and quite a few of the things to be explored were new to me. But, it's summer and I have time to try things out, "get messy," as Detective Roberts says, and just play around.

Blackboard worked perfectly for me at the first session! I still have to get used to more than one thing happening -- the main presentation and chat going on at the same time. I feel like I missed some things. I like how open-ended the activities are. There are many choices, all with the same main goal of exploring the whats, whys, and wheres of interacting on the web and creating a PLN.

We have assignments each week. One of the first is to create a home base for my PLN: this blog is it. We are also to introduce ourselves to the class using a Google doc and to lurk amongst the information posted by our classmates. Lurking is an activity that I am good at and through my poking around so far I can see my classmates are an interesting group of people, many of them already very knowledgeable about digital footprints.

So, the experience so far is a bit overwhelming, definitely nonlinear, and fun as I dip my toe in. Isn't there a famous quote about the importance of trying things that scare us?