Activity Reflection 3
Our assignment for class this week was to complete an “About Me” page that would be connected to our blog. First we needed to decide who are audience would be; other educators, or parents/students. Since I’m currently not teaching I decided that mine would be geared towards other educators.I had never done anything like this before so I was a little apprehensive in how I was going to complete this assignment. I never even gave my online identity any thought; for that matter I didn’t know if I even had an online identity. But I took to this assignment with an open mind.
I started with a link given to us by our instructor, called Online Identity Calculator. This website allows you to find out information about your online identity; who the rest of the online world sees you as. This site takes into account the amount of information that is found about you on Google. Your results are displayed on a bar graph with four areas; Digitally Disastrous, Digitally Distinct, Digitally Dissed, or Digitally Dabbling. When I filled out the information, I wasn’t surprised to find out that I was Digitally Disastrous. I really haven’t made that much of a digital impression on the world.
I found this statement in our reading of The Future of Reputation by Daniel J. Solove, and it really made an impression on me. It goes, “the information that emerges in a Google search of a person’s name might not all relate to that person—it could pertain to other people with the same name. Or it could be spoofed.” (Solove 2007). I found this to be accurate when I used Google to search for my name. I was surprised to find that my name yielded 10 results. But what was even more surprising to me, is that some of them weren’t even about me. I had truly not expected my name to pop up anywhere on the internet.
To start building my teacher’s profile page, I decided to use Google Profile, the only reason why I choose this is because I like the way it looked. Using Google Profile was pretty straight forward, I had very little trouble following the about page instructions given to us. We needed to fill in pieces of information about ourselves. This included personal information from our name, our teaching philosophy, and even inserting a picture. The next step was to link our new “About Me” page to my blog. This gave me no trouble at all, as I added the link to my Blogger page with ease.
However, I had some difficulty linking my Blog to my “About Me” profile in Google Profiles. My Blogger home page wouldn’t allow me to remove the link to my Blogger Profile and replace it with the link to my Google Profile. So, I decided to create my “About Me” page using Blogger Profiles as well. That way, I’d have both bases covered. Unfortunately, I ran into yet another problem when trying to write the “About Me” section in Blogger. Apparently you can only have a maximum 1200 characters, and my post was a bit longer than that. So, I fell back and wrote it in Google Profile.
To sum things up, this assignment taught me about my online identity as a professional educator. In this case, I didn’t have much (if any) of one. I did find it interesting that my leave of absence from the Seminole County School System from 1997 did show up in my search results.
According to our reading this week, our reputation is one of our most cherished assets (Solove 2007). I have always believed this to be true, but never stopped to realize how the digital age has changed the landscape of our lives.
I leave you with this last thought as you work, play, and post items on the internet. “The Internet, however, makes gossip a permanent reputational stain; one that never fades. It is available around the world and with Google it can be readily found in less than a second” (Solove 2007).
Works Citied:
- Solove, Daniel J. (2007). The Future of Reputation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
- Online Identity Calculator
- Google Profiles
- You can find my full profile on Google Profiles here.
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