Think Like a Teacher

We are all aware of our digital footprints these days, and we caution our students to be aware of the potential future impact of their digital droppings. I wonder, however, about the opposite problem:  the footprints we leave in sands to wash away with changing tides. How can we, as children or adults, plan and preserve the digital archive we want without having to reformat or create new versions every 24 months or so? If a student today wants to be able to retrace his/her own path, what shoes should he/she wear on the trail? How can we avoid having to reformat our lives to fit ever changing media so we can preserve a digital footpath to be retraced in the future?

In the past couple of months, I have helped my husband sift through family archive photo albums as we emptied out an apartment of a loved one who had passed away. I have mourned the changes to the recently aired version of A Charlie Brown Christmas (an heirloom of a sort in this family) as compared to the original 1965 version. I realized that no two are alike: the 1965 version I have memorized (and sang in), the VHS tape for which we longer have a player, the recently remastered BluRay version, and the current on-air version. I even tried  the iTunes version…all different. Stashed around our technojunkyard house we have LP’s, CDs, MP3s, Hi-8 video tapes, VHS tapes, DVDs, BluRays, 3 1/2 inch floppies, USB sticks, zip disks, negatives, paper prints, scans, digpix, SD cards, compact flash cards, iCloud files, Win files, Mac files, Facebook pages, Picasa pages, Google+ photos, and — yes — some very old photo albums from the days when photography was new, hanging precariously from black corners that have lost their adhesive.

I want my four year old grandson to learn to build a digital pathway instead of leaving random droppings. Unless he/we constantly revisit(s), reformat(s), and re-collect(s) the footprints of his life, we will never have the same kind of treasury that once resided in smelly old photo albums. And as we revisit, we will be tempted to change the versions just a bit. I wonder about the ethics of being a revisionist vs an archivist. And selecting the tools will never be a “final answer,” but simply a prediction of today’s high and low tide media. This is the other side of digital footprints. Something more to teach and learn.