The idea that such actions
could adversely affect
them when applying for
jobs, running for elected
office, or even trying
to get a date in college
seems difficult for them
to imagine.
student doesn’t want to dig up the
dirt on his or her teacher? After you
show them how to vet the facts, they
begin to look at every piece of data
skeptically.
For this lesson to work, you need
to give students the name of a willing adult who has some degree of
web presence. I have had a few other
teachers volunteer to be data mined,
but searches turned up little more
than the names of relatives, addresses,
and phone numbers due to their limited digital footprints.
Data Mining a Stranger
The next part of the lesson is to allow
students to test drive what they’ve
learned about privacy and personal
data-search tools. This task allows students to apply their own analysis and
evaluation skills and learn firsthand
the limits of internet privacy. Their
assignment, executed in teams of two
over two class periods, looks like this:
Learning cOnnec TiOnS |
Browse social networking sites or
personal blogs and find a “subject”
who meets the following requirements:
• Provides first and last name
• Provides current city and
state of residence
• Has a discernible gender
• Provides at least “ballpark”
age (adults between the ages
of 28 and 40 are best)
• Is not from our town
• Is a complete stranger
• Is an ordinary person
Create an electronic presentation
with the following slides:
• Cover (with person’s photo
and first name only)
• Basic information from their
social network site or blog (what
you started with and why you
thought it was important)
• What you found from your
search results—with sources!
• Conclusion (four deductions/
inferences about your person
and two issues/concerns with
online privacy)
When they finish their data mining, the student teams present their
projects to the class. It is amazing
to see what students can find out in
just a few hours. Relatives, addresses,
pictures of houses, housing prices, estimated income (using a few different
estimation methods), dates of birth
(usually given away by blog entries of
their friends), and much more allow
students to create fairly robust profiles of their subjects. Of course, some
subjects turn out to be difficult to data
mine, but there are lessons from them
as well, and students must explain
them in their work.
Student reactions to this assignment are commonly a mix of fascination, worries about their own online
choices, and at times a feeling of
“creepiness” when they discover they
are much easier to learn about online
than they ever imagined.
The final step in this lesson is for us
all to walk through the privacy settings on students’ Facebook accounts
to evaluate their importance and
choose appropriate settings. At this
point, they all make changes.
I get more parent compliments on
this assignment than on any other.
Parents are understandably interested
in ensuring their children learn safe
online behavior but have little training and experience in exactly how to
do that. Many of them even ask for a
copy of the recommended privacy settings for their own use.
This assignment makes the topic very
real for students, and many of them go
on to use these skills in many creative
ways, such as helping their parents
track down hard-to-find clients!
This lesson is an excellent way to
teach higher-order cognitive skills using technology as a medium. And it
illustrates that if you are a good digital
citizen and make good choices about
what you share online, you have nothing to fear. Your online “image” will
reflect positively on you.
Resources
Datamining list: www.delicious.com/jessethe
csguy/datamining
No Place to Hide documentary: www.snagfilms.
com/films/title/peter_jennings_reporting_no_
place_to_hide
—Jesse Morehouse teaches computer science
at Pagosa Springs High School in Colorado,
USA. He loves seeing students apply what they
learn. Data mine him using his professional
user ID, techkilljoy.
