Digital Footprints

This week's essential question is: When and where should we be teaching students about their digital footprint?

Our face-to-face (f2f) meeting this week included Ms. Silvia Tolisano's fascinating presentation about the nature of one’s presence online presence, or "digital footprint". She emphasized that we have moved beyond the time where "digital invisibility" is a reasonable expectation for students... or even a desirable one.

Educators vary widely in their understanding of digital footprints and the emerging technologies that make them possible. Those "in-the-know" may offer advice or informal instruction, but these efforts can not be counted upon to reach all students. At my school there is little in the curriculum about online behavior other than plagiarism. Formal efforts to raise student awareness about digital footprints and cyberbullying include showing a video (see below) in which a hard copies of girl's picture are subsituted for the digital image, showing how it is impossible to remove.



This is a crucial lesson, especially for the younger grades, but is it, alone, the best approach? As with all social and global issues, we want children to understand the seriousness of our message, but we must not frighten or upset them so much that they shut the information out and ignore it. In this case, we must be careful not to engender a feeling of helplessness, especially in students whose social lives are inseparable from online media and who may not be willing to give up their online activites for safety. There is some evidence of this attitude. In his article on digital footprints and employment, Fields Mosley quotes a man who refuses to worry about his online footprint because, he says, it's beyond his control.

So, what about our students who have already made these indelible errors? What about those who, for whatever reason, are unwilling to curtail their online antics?

There are always steps one can take to improve one’s online image. In her online article, Kim Komando suggests (among other things) highlighting positive achievements online, encouraging links to these, and constructive blogging about one’s passions. This has the double benefit of showing off one's accomplishments and pushing any negative links out of the top search results.

How important is all of this to our students? A clearly written article in admissions.com cites Kaplan research showing that 10% of college admissions offices reported looking up applicants on facebook. Other social networking sites, googling, and so on are also commonly used by universities and prospective employers and the numbers seem likely to increase.

As educators, we should go beyond the teaching about the dangers of online life. Clearly, student safety is the first priority and these lessons have their place. However, we should augment our instruction with information about the benefits a digital footpring might have on college admissions or hiring. Imagine googling a young applicant to find not evidence of drinking and immature behaviors, but a blog ongoing involvement with a subject of interest like music, community service, or biology. One can easily imagine the extra boost such a result might give in the increasingly competitive admissions and hiring offices.

The place for these lessons is not as obvious to me. Some possible ideas include a few classes (perhaps in the freshman seminar my school offers) for early high schoolers on not just erasing or sanitizing, but estabilshing their digital footprint, along with all the safety instruction about identity protection, social networking behaviors, online predators and so on. The counselling office could work with all college-bound juniors and all seniors research and improves their digital footprints. Then the students would be empowered to make sure the image they're projecting (safely) to the world is the one they want their prospective schools and employers to see.

Thanks for the image found through creative commons.