Today I challenged myself to do one of the scariest things online yet again...I...dun...dun...duuuuuun...googled myself. Having done a vanity search in the past and come up with fairly minimal results, I wasn't expecting to see anything too surprising. As I mentioned in another post, I've always been fairly careful about what I post online using my full name.
When I google searched my name this time, I tried several methods. Any search using my real full name whether with or without quotes yielded the exact same results as last time. I also tried adding the name of my college after my given name and got no additional results. Considering I have used nicknames to create the majority of the accounts for this class, I'm not surprised.
The real pay dirt of my google searching came when I did a google search for my class nickname. When I first typed in my nickname, let's pretend it's Jane Doe, I received a lot of hits that were not related to me. The only hit that came up that was mine was my Protopages site. I tried adding an advanced search function to the username to see if I could pull up my YouTube or Twitter accounts. Searching "Jane Doe" site:twitter.com and "Jane Doe" site:youtube.com did not yield additional results related to me. I was a bit perplexed as to why nothing on me popped up. I went and looked at my Twitter account and realized that my name there and on YouTube as well had no space between the two words. Once I searched for "JaneDoe" using site for YouTube and then Twitter, the results were finally the accounts I had created and the videos that I had uploaded. Success!!!
For students, I think the lesson is still the same, be careful what you post online. With the right search words you can find anything. Knowing the nicknames I use online means that people can still find things even if I don't use my full name. When we're teenagers, we like to think that our friends will be our besties forever. In reality, as we grow older and mature, that isn't always the case. Our besties know a lot about us. Enough to know our nicknames etc. When I was younger someone told me, don't post anything online that you wouldn't want your parents to see.
Seeing how easy it is to find information online with just a nickname, students should also learn to be careful who they trust online. It seems that we hear new cases frequently about children who were lured by adults online. Not everyone you meet online is trustworthy. I'll give you an example from my own life. In my teenage years, I was a huge teeny bopper. I was a big fan of the band Nsync. Back in those days, the internet wasn't quite as developed as it is now. Facebook didn't exist to the general populous. MySpace was just starting to become a thing. Many fans of boybands joined message boards where we could talk about upcoming concerts or specials we'd seen on TV etc. I remember on one of these particular message boards, three or four other members and I appointed ourselves as a sort of protector on the board. We'd noticed that there were a few people every week who would come on to the board and post pretending to be one of the band members. These people often seemed to target some of the younger fans on there. Some people really believed they were talking to Justin Timberlake. What we would do is whenever one of these fakers would come on to the board, we'd start asking them questions. Their answers would prove they really didn't know much at all about Nsync. Back then there wasn't the same ability to report users or possible pedophiles that there is not built into many social media outlets. This is one of the things I fear the most for many of my students online. There are a lot of strange people out there. I think students need to be wary not only of the appropriateness of what they post online, but also who are they sharing this information with? Who are they trusting that they have never met?
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