Cleaning up my Digital Life for the New Year

The end of the year always seems like a convenient time to organize my life. Perhaps it's an illusion, but I somehow believe that I'll be able to start fresh for the new year. Maybe NEXT year I'll be more organized!

This Christmas I got a new laptop (a MacBook Pro, 320 GB with 8 Gig of RAM!) so for the past few days I've been focused on migrating data and cleaning out files as I set up my digital life in its new home. I also added an iPad to the mix last summer, so with my iPhone and my new MacBook Pro, my computing world is now just about perfect! I created a new taxonomy for my files, researched personal productivity tools, and renewed all of my "tried and true" online subscriptions to productivity tools like Remember the Milk and Evernote for another year.

However, as I took inventory of my online presence, I realized that I have neglected this blog - the last post on this blog was in 2009! It's not that I haven't been online - I just have too many places to post and keep up with! I experienced information overload this year, and even took a hiatus from all online interaction to spend time in my garden this past summer. It was very cathartic, and I highly recommend "unplugging" for awhile.

So, here we are in December, another year has flown by, and I just finished teaching Business Information Management during Fall quarter. In this course we discuss the definitions of data, information and knowledge, information overload and many other related topics. Students were required to blog throughout the quarter about the topics covered each week. For many, this was the first time they had ever "blogged" and they were a bit apprehensive about it!

At the beginning of the quarter I proposed a question for them to ponder, "are blogs information?" For those that did not have an active online life, the initial answer to this question was "no.' Blogs were seen as something frivolous and personal - even a waste of time. Some did not see blogs or twitter as information of value to business. Throughout the quarter, in addition to their blogging assignments, I provided readings from blog articles, and my own "lectures" were in the form of blog posts in the online classroom. By the end of the quarter, the students' reflections told a different story. Many students wrote that reading other perspectives helped them to gain a better understanding of the course materials. There was a sense of community and learning together. Through participating in the process of blogging and commenting on other blogs, they were able to clarify and articulate their own knowledge. They definitely saw the value in blogs as information.

In my final wrap-up post to the class, I wrote "The world's knowledge is made up of many voices and ideas. If people weren't willing to codify their knowledge in some form (writing, video, audio, etc.) and put it out there for others to use, we would not have the vast network of information that we rely on for our work and our daily lives."

Well, I guess I should take my own advice. I resolve to blog more in 2011 and contribute in some small way to the knowledge network of the world. :)