Week 1: Week1: What is Web 2.0? - Vanity Search

The assignment is to search out yourself in Google to evaluate your digital footprint. After putting in my name what came up was not much of a surprise because it covered all the things that I thought would be found about me.

First thing observed was the entry that my job at the university has posted about me on their site.  It tells very little about me except that I work in the School of Geology, Energy & the Environment as a gallery educator and assistant. The second entry list me on the Monnig Museum web site and it contains information about the museum and how to contact me to schedule a tour or outreach. Again it does not say a lot about me, but it does have an accompanying short bio. In the images section there are a couple of actual pictures of me, but just a couple its mostly filled with filler images of other people not me and it has a picture of one of my projects that I had found on Pinterest.  Pinterest is a site I visit often and pick projects that I would like to do or that I have done .

When you get to my Linkedin site that’s where you will find real information about me and what I am doing professionally and academically along with a healthy connection to other professionals that I either work with on a professional level or know on a personal level. Here you can get a link to my other network sites like my blogs and my e-portfolio. The next entry deals with my connection to graduate studies at TAMUC because I am a member of Research Gate.  But I have done very little with this organization, but seeing this I know I need to rectify my lack of activity.  I had a total of forty-four entries relating to me to my amazement.  Some were very inaccurate, but by and large most where spot on. 

There where sites where people who I visited for the museum published write-up articles about their visits or schools that I did special outreaches. Even awards or recognitions that I have received where published.  Every recent class I’ve taken in the last five years was there and names of the courses in except for one school where I took a series of carpentry classes at Northlake College in Irving.  The amusing thing is whenever I checked for myself, in the past, on Google I never looked beyond the first page. This exercise made me look beyond the first set of entries!  I thought my digital footprint was smaller than this, but I was only taking into account the entries that I had made over the years not the many entries made by groups and organizations that I am affiliated as well as all the places I have traveled in order to do this job at the Monnig.

My instructor is saying that my digital footprint is only going to get larger as I explore more technological tools, I shudder to think how much so! I’m not sure how I feel about this much information about me being available through the World Wide Web.  Even my count in the census.  I have trouble with the inaccurate information and wonder how can I get that removed or changed? It just shows how much we are not in a closed bubble.  When I was a girl the book 1984 by George Orwell (Orwell, 1949) had people of the time fearing “Big Brother.” It was a part of my high school reading list and later when it was made into a movie I saw it. What would those same people think of today’s system where everything you do is recorded somewhere for everyone to view.  I am not super private but gee; this was a lot. I think I would not be very concerned if it where all accurate, but it’s not.  There are far too many discrepancies for me to feel all right about it.

Now I have to add even more to this “digital me” that I have to be mindful of. I stayed away from doing a lot of post on the two Facebook accounts that I had because I didn’t want to expose myself to the digital world too much. The only reason I have two Facebooks is because I manage one for my job and the other is my personal page. I stayed away from Twitter, MySpace, and a few other personal sites because I did not want to share a lot of personal information about myself outside of the academic arena. But after seeing this, I might as well have stated my side of how many visits that I made to each school and what I did because it’s there without my input.  I should have discussed how I felt  about this or that to some degree, because here I am in the digital world. The digital world is getting a view of me that has very little input from me and therefore quite one sided.

Thank goodness I’ve never done anything questionable or illegal.  Recently, a young woman won a legal case where a former boyfriend was trying to publish inappropriate pictures of her on the internet.  She won but I know she is still scared from this experience and it will be a part of the World Wide Web forever.  The fact the she won will be of little consequence because through the pictures are blocked from publication the knowledge of the event still lingers. Nothing ever leaves the internet, it’s there forever. Then we have to be concerned about the Dark Web¹ and cyber criminals.  Even though our readings don’t discuss this side of cyberspace it is a real concern.

The video that we viewed on “Did You Know?”  (http://youtu.be/6ILQrUrEWe8) related some mind numbing statistics; last year I saw another similar YouTube video that showed statistics based on education and population explosions in key major countries across the globe.  It was the “Did You Know 3.0 from 2012”(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_aiE ) about how fast new information is gathered in every area of life. All of these types of visual demonstrations are designed to make one think, reflect and ponder where are we going with all of this? Who will be our new world leaders? Where will we fit into this matrix? How can we prepare our children for this type of globalization in the runaway information age?

The realities of life in America can be harsh and confusing to our youth, but as educators we must prepare them. The little song bite “Not on the Test”  (http://youtu.be/8dAujuqCo7s) is a reminder of how learning is being test driven today.  I found it cute but very profound. The question it asked is simply what are we going to do about this and how can we help our youth survive the realities of today? There was nothing vane about this experience it was totally eye-opening and informative.

¹ Dark Web - is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets, overlay networks which use the Internet but require specific software, configurations or authorization to access. (defined by Wikipedia)

References

Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four.