geek.teacher

Recently, Roger Zuidema asked a rather innocuous question:

I immediately suggested that he demonstrate his own footprint.

Needeless to say, Twitter once again became the digital equivalent of a tangent for me, because this got me thinking…where did I take my first steps on the web? How far back could you trace my attempts to participate in the conversation and establish a place and identity for myself? I’ve been on the internet for about 15 years now, since I started on local BBSs and then AOL my freshman year of high school.

In general, the more information you know about your person of interest, the more exact the results will get.  So, for somebody who just knows my name, googling me will provide links to this blog, my twitter feed, and my Google profile. From there, of course, one could easily follow my links to numerous other places I pop in and out on the web. This shows the positive side of working on your digital profile. With a name as common as mine, I’m pretty pleased that I pop up 3 times on the first page of a google search. At the same time, though, doing I’ve only clearly established my identity with my nickname. Doing a more formal search only provides my Google profile hiding at the bottom of the page.

If you know a little bit more about a person, however, that’s where things get interesting. For example, if you were to know other handles or e-mail addresses used by the person, you could find something much older, like the archive of my old home page I created in high school and updated sporadically through my first year of college, which still lives because of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Yes, you can see my digital footprints clearly stretching back more than a decade. Now, while I find it pretty embarassing in the general sense that I would find almost anything from that period of my life embarrassing, I’m pretty fortunate that this still clearly passes Vicki Davis’ President test. Amazingly enough, 18 year old me was a really geeky, terribly awkward writer. Not much has changed in the past 12 years.

So if you’re teaching students about establishing a digital footprint, using two simple tools can help them understand that the internet remembers everything. When your students are job-hunting some day, they should assume their perspective employers will, at the very least run a Google search on them.  Future bosses will probably want to check out their Facebook/MySpace/Twitter/social network du jour.  What do they want the internet to say?

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