A Little Bit Literate

Right Tool for the Job

It's interesting that my two classes are so intertwined. For a project in my other class (Information Policy with Professor Rabina), I'm using tons of instructional technology to get my work done, and in this class, I find myself occasionally grappling with information policy issues (like privacy, for example).

For my group project in Info Policy, I'm using Google Reader to track a number of information policy related blogs, and then saving and tagging them using Delicious, while my partner finds articles from the New York Times and slashdot online and adds them to a spreadsheet in Google Docs. We've been keeping tabs on each others' work using these tools, and started another Google Doc to start organizing our ideas for the paper. And yes, even with all of these tools, we get the most work done face-to-face, but I find the tracking of the articles and collaboration much simpler with all these tools, and the kinds of analysis we'll be able to do are more varied.

I'll know for sure how well these tools worked after we write the paper over the weekend, but my right now I'm feeling pretty good. I should note that my partner and I each chose tools that would work best for us, that we were most comfortable with, and that allowed for us to share our work as we do it. I think that having that choice makes the work a lot easier. Delicious is an intuitive way for me to track the articles and blog posts we're analyzing, and I can create an entire "bundle" of tags devoted to this project so that I can look at all of them (and the stats for each tag) in one place. Looking at my partner's spreadsheet, I can't pull out the information easily, but for her it makes perfect sense. We agreed to keep one Google Doc for the paper from the earliest drafting stages forward, to keep our original early work in mind by having it right there on the page with the work we're building on that initial foundation. I think this should be an interesting way to see the work evolve, but it will also make it easier for us build a consistent argument throughout the paper as we flesh it out.

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I'm also starting to realize how many technological tools I use on a regular basis to keep myself organized (or at least to tell myself I am). I keep trying different kinds of citation tools (Zotero, CiteULike, Mendeley, EndNote) at work and for my own purposes, and I use Delicious, but I used to use Google Bookmarks (still in the process of migrating those), and I use Google Reader (and sometimes iGoogle) to track my favorite websites (too many to really read, but I catch up when I can). I used to think it was flaky of me to be spread thin across the technology, but more and more I think it's a smart career move to be familiar with so many different tools, and to know them well enough to know when they are appropriate and when they are not.