Head Tale

It's a loooong story but in our genealogy class, there was a bit of a revolt and a group of students ended up going to the prof to request our final assignment be changed from something that, as assigned, was going to be very redundant and not give us much in the way of  library-centered learning (basically, the assignment was “do your family history and report on what you found”) to something more useful. 

At a class meeting, someone came up with the idea that we should have the option to do our final presentation on a genealogy-related area of interest or expertise for ourselves.  In effect, we would teach each other, seminar-style.  The prof agreed to this proposal along with the option to still do the original assignment for those who preferred that and/or had already done significant amounts of work on it.

I chose the new assignment and also, to come at the idea from a slightly different angle (something I love doing!).  So instead of talking about resources people are using for genealogy today, I tried to picture how librarians and others might be doing genealogical research in the future but looking back at us who are alive today.

“How will our children find out about us?” was the theme of the my presentation and the title I gave it was “Your Digital Footprint: Non-Traditional Genealogy Research on the Internet.”

Have I typed about this before?  I'm starting to have deja vu sometimes when I go to post having done just under 500 posts in the past year!  <quick search of site>  Oh, I did an entry while working on the presentation that explains what I was attempting to do:

I plan to talk
about how our children (and grandchildren) might someday do
genealogical research about all of us using intentional things like our
blog posts and our posts to message boards as well as unintentional
online traces like organization newsletters, workplace archives,
University web sites and so on.  I'm also going to talk about things
that are going to increasingly be a factor in recording your digital
footprint – social networking sites, even better search engines, even
better web sites and technologies that we can't even imagine, the invisible web becoming
more visible and so on.

So anyhow, this is all an extremely long-winded way (and ain't they all on this blog? ) of saying that, no matter what I called it, what my presentation really was in many ways was “Introduction to Online Stalking 101”. 

I don't necessarily mean stalking in the harmful sense of the word (although that is a huge issue of course) but in the (do I even risk using the word?) …playful…way that people can sit at their computers for fifteen minutes and find out so much about other people, whether the stalkee realises their information is out there or not (and frankly, part of my presentation was to hopefully make classmates realise their information was out there even if they didn't think it was.) 

Why is this presentation on my mind tonight?  Someone sent me a private message on Facebook that led to me checking out a particular web site.  On that site, someone had left a comment.  I followed a link on that comment to the commentor's web site which led to a post they'd made months ago about a class at FIMS which was none too flattering towards either the class and the prof. 

So this person, who may or may not be someone I know, thinks they've had a relatively anonymous rant about a class and really, it's about one blog post away from being fairly public knowledge. 

I'm not going to do that of course.  And I have my own worries about how some future employer/colleague/co-worker may react to something I've written or posted here – especially since I've made a decision not to be anonymous with this blog (and realising that nothing is ever truly anonymous on the Internet either.)  Nothing I've written was meant to offend anyone  (unless they've offended me first, bastards! )  But criticism and even differing opinions do get people's backs up – that's only natural.

So uhm, be careful what you write out there.  Or at least be prepared to deal with the consequences.  (I used a stat in my presentation that something like 33% of employers use Google to look up potential employees and 10% are even looking at social neworking sites now.) 

One last thing – in that presentation, I had the brilliant idea to link to a YouTube clip as the final slide of my presentation.  But doing a last minute edit, I somehow deleted the link and, having had troubles with technology already that day (the batteries on the remote for the projector went dead when it was my turn to present), I just read the statement you see below (which I luckily had on my notes in front of me at the podium) rather than trying to find the clip after a long morning of presentations (including mine which I'm pretty sure went longer than it was supposed to.)

Here you go – sorry it's so choppy.  (And how does something like this that I uploaded once and never looked at again have 200 views already?  Crazy!)