The essential unique search tool your students may have never used — from novemberlearning.com by Alan November
The Wayback Machine is as basic a reference tool for the Internet Age as a dictionary. When was the last time you saw a student use it?
Excerpt:
When I’m giving a talk to students about being responsible digital citizens, I’ll tell them, “You know, some day you might apply to college, or run for Congress—and you might regret something you posted online when you were young.” And there’s always one student who will say to me, “Mr. November, we’re not that stupid—we’re going to take those things off the Web before we apply to college.”
At that point, I pause the discussion. I show them a website called the Wayback Machine, and I call up some website that’s been gone for 10 years. There it is, live on the screen, as if it never had vanished. Typically, all of the links work as well.
The audience goes from laughing at me for how naïve I am for not realizing there is a delete button for web content to stunned silence in the blink of an eye.
I should really bring paper bags, because some kids are so nervous about the implications of what they’ve just seen, they’re hyperventilating. They simply had no idea that the overwhelming majority of the Internet is being saved in its entirety, links and all. This happens every few weeks or months, depending on the nature of a website and how often it’s updated.
What happens when you’re reading an article online, and you come across a link and you click on it, but it’s dead? They’ll say, “Well, I just give up.” And I say, “Watch this: You just copy the link, and you paste it into the Wayback Machine, and presto—there’s the website.”
From DSC:
I’m guessing this can be a scary thing — not just for students, but for adults as well. I post it so that we can impress on our students NOT to post things that they don’t want to haunt them later on in life (which is a tall order indeed).