When I took the MME/ACT, it was all on paper. But everything is digital nowadays, right? I mean, does the high school class of 2014 even request for paper copies of scores to be sent...? Some quick Googling took me to the ACT's website, where some quick trial-and-error of old potential usernames (ohhh, blondie73) told me that I had, at some point, actually made an account with the ACT. And my score report from the 2007 MME/ACT is still available. Crazy.
This brings me to my point of a digital footprint, albeit on a smaller scale. We've talked about this before in class, but looking up my old scores really hammered it home. People not that much older than myself have a box of papers in their parent's basement to turn to if they ever were curious about their own long-forgotten tests. And, really, there's no reason I can think of where I'd need to know my ACT Writing subscore ever again, but it slightly blows my mind that I can call from any computer if the whim ever arises. And that says nothing of the students now who will be taking exclusively online standardized tests. Their records will probably ONLY be available online, for who knows how long past when they'd reasonably need to access them.
This all, in my opinion, is a separate scenario from the "online footprint" associated with embarrassing statuses, corny photos, and other social media evidence gathered over the years. What I'm thinking of here is specifically this accumulation of records and other information scattered across different sites. Just off the top of my head I know I have accounts with the ACT, SAT, AP, GRE, MTTC, and probably various other ones that I'm forgetting. This is an academic online footprint, a curation of your educational progress, digitized and preserved so that you can prove to your grandchildren that you got a 35 on the science subtest in 2007. (That's just hypothetical - there are many reasons I'm an English concentrator, and my science subscores may be one of them).
I know police records and the like have been online for years, but what I'm thinking about here is more the "box in the basement" stuff - the forgotten tests and report cards you sift through maybe once a decade. I know I still have my K-12 records somewhere, complete with gold stickers and crumple marks from where the reports were shoved in my backpack. Maybe I'm focusing too much on just a tiny part of online learning, but this idea of an academic digital footprint kind of amazes me. I'm not sure I'll ever look at my ACT score again, but it's there, in case I ever want to. I wonder how long it will take before report cards, test scores, everything, are all just uploaded somewhere instead of being sent home. Or maybe they already are... UM does pretty much all scoring online, but at least when I was in high school, we still had paper report cards mailed home.
Will this change the way we approach the grades and tests? Would you care more if you knew every score of yours was preserved indefinitely somewhere on a server? Could we better analyze progress and setbacks? Would this help? Would this detract? Would it make no difference? And, what does that mean for us?
