Staying Organized Online Week 5 Blog

I would describe myself as being an organized person. My classroom desk is always clear, everything has a place and if it is not, I find myself feeling anxious and unable to concentrate. At home, I am more flexible, but professionally speaking...I definitely like my order!

As I continue my journey at UOIT and keep learning about edtech, I keep acquiring more and more web tools, apps, sites and articles that I would like to keep for future use. While I am able to sort and organize physical items in life, I find that I have room to  improve when it comes to the virtual world.

Most of what I do today for work, for my own professional development and even socially is through my computer. The amount of time we spend online doesn't seem to condense, in fact, it just gets larger and larger. It seems like there is always something else to learn/ see/ do! Research states that average internet usage time has doubled over the last 10 years (Karaian, 2015).

So what does this mean for me? It means that the amount of information and content I have acquired and will acquired will just keep exponentially growing and it is time for me to start thinking of organizing myself online! Every summer I tell myself I will do this, but I somehow continue putting it off. The result? I now have over 1,000 unread emails (just on my main email account), multiple google drive accounts with unsorted documents, different bookmarks saved in multiple web browsers, and have an inefficient use of many social media accounts.

I decided to focus my blog on learning about some organizational tools that can help me tackle some of my issues...

1.  I started looking at organizing my social media (clearly I am still procrastinating with my document files). If you have been reading my previous blog posts you will know that I have just started using Twitter. I am really enjoying using this social media application, but keep wondering how people are able to effectively use it once they begin to follow multiple users. I was happy to learn about TweetDeck. It is available as a desktop tool that organizes your screen into different columns that you can set up and organize according to what you are interested in staying "on top of". I thought this was a great way to follow certain hashtags and see activities your are interested in on one place. The tool was also very user friendly and took no time to set up. There were multiple youtube videos explaining its use and tricks too.

Through my research, I also found that there were other tools that help integrate multiple social media apps and enable you to post to all at the same time and enable you to even schedule posts (Alternion, Hootsuite). I had not even considered this concept and thought it was a great tool for companies to utilize. They can even track the views of their posts with analytic capabilities the programs offer. Many individuals and business executives have difficulty finding the time to manage their social presence (Zeng, Chen, Lusch, & Li, 2010). , and these tools help overcome this barrier. Many companies realize that:  "If you do not participate in Facebook, YouTube, you are not part of cyberspace anymore. Social Media allow companies to engage in timely and direct end-consumer contact at relatively low cost and higher levels of efficiency than can be achieved with more traditional communication tools"  (Kaplan, 2010).


2.  After learning about organizing social media, I moved on to organizing my research articles. Part of Rob Power's EDUC101G course, includes organizing our research into Zotero. It can be used personally to collect, organize and helps you cite your sources, but also lets you have a collaborative component by creating shared groups. In our course, this is where students can organize their research and it allows others to view/ find articles that may be of interest for us as well. I have taken many other courses through my education career and one of the course requirements I sometimes dread is having to read pre-assigned articles chosen by the instructor. There are times I am really not motivated to read about certain topics and find it more of a nuisance than anything else. I find myself taking up time trying to follow an article that I have no interest in and then later forgetting its contents anyways. Using Zotero to share everyone's articles collected on the course topics gives each student ownership in selecting what interests them and makes the whole experience a much more pleasurable and educational one!


3.  As we navigate through the WWW there are so many tools and sites that we think we would love to save for another time. We click on "save to bookmarks" and before you know it, your browser contains thousands. So how can we keep ourselves organized with bookmarking? Apart from taking the extra step in creating folders to separate bookmarks, I have begun using Delicious. This online program allows you to keep, share and even discover other bookmarks under user-created tags. I find that using this program allows me to access all my bookmarks regardless of what browser I am using. As long as I make sure to label and tag my bookmarks correctly, I can easily retrieve the information I am looking for.


4. As for email and cloud storage clean up? Well...it's time for me to stop procrastinating.  There are a number of tricks I've found on how to organize email, but unfortunately, many are pretty intuitive: schedule emails to be sent later, use labels and folders, using the search button or deleting unnecessary emails (Patel 2012). I just need to sit down with a nice glass of (insert here), turn on some fun music and get to work. I guess that's what happens when you let the clutter accumulate!

References

Kaplan, A. M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68.

Karaian, J. (2015, June 1). We now spend more than eight hours a day consuming media. Retrieved February 15, 2016, from http://qz.com/416416/we-now-spend-more-than-eight-hours-a-day-consuming-media/

Patel, A. (2012, February 21). Junk? Spam? Labels? How To Organize Your Inbox. Retrieved February 15, 2016, from: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/02/21/how-to-clean-your-inbox_n_1285511.html

Zeng, D., Chen, H., Lusch, R., & Li, S.-H. (2010). Social Media Analytics and Intelligence. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 25(6), 13–16. http://doi.org/10.1109/MIS.2010.151