"Google isn't a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system."
This comes from one of my favourite blogs, collision detection. Google is the archive of our time; the library of Alexandria of the modern age, but it is much more then that. Google is also the place where we find our nodes, the trusted sources of information that we come to rely on. Entering communities and conversations is something that just is not easy for kids to do. For them to learn how to enter a community, get quickly up - to - speed with the latest information, evaluating all of the content and sifting for the important pieces, is an extremely difficult task.
Immersing kids in the world of information, in RSS, and in Technorati, teaching them to create and use watchlists, sorting through disparate pieces of the information puzzle, and teaching them to capitalize on the power of this network is vital.
Some of the kids in my class have been working with other kids, in far - flung schools across the globe for almost two full school years now. What happens when these kids leave my classroom? Will they still have access to these trusted nodes? Will the time spent in my classroom be enough to sustain the empowerment they have been working through? For many of these students, the answer, of course, is no. When they leave my classroom, many of their blogs will fall silent, they will leave their Bloglines accounts behind, and they will carry on as before. But some of the kids (based on last year's experience, about 1/3) will retain their blogs, their RSS accounts, their watchlists, and the information sphere that they spent time building up.
For these kids, their information lives and their relationship to information has changed. They have learned to find trusted nodes based on their own experiences, and based on the reputations they investigate using tools like Google. I encourage my kids to Google themselves, check themselves out on Technorati and to learn to watch what others are writing about them. Just as in the junior high they are living through right now, online, reputation is everything.
technorati tags:clive, thompson, collision, detection, technorati, blogging
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