Exploring New Ways to Share

One of the challenges of being a librarian and teacher (really an employee of any organization) is what happens while you are out of the office – whether on vacation or out sick. How many emails are being pumped into my mail box? Am I missing any important calls? Who (if any one) is taking care of the commitments I am not able to keep?

What’s most troublesome for me is that many of my lesson plans are housed in My Documents: if I am out unexpectedly and am to teach that day, no one is able to get to my lesson plans and PowerPoint presentations. The result? Someone is not prepared to teach on my behalf and the session may need to be canceled.

Google Docs, as well as similar programs, may help to alleviate this teaching crisis. Now, I can post my session outlines and slides on the web and allow my colleagues access to these materials: if I’m home sick, I can log on to my home computer, grant permission to my colleagues, and instantly they have access to the documents they need. Not only would others be able to use my slides and notes, but they could also add content and ideas (creativity has a way of flourishing when ideas and concepts are shared).

About two weeks ago I was called to jury duty (yes, I actually had to serve and was the jury foreman). Unfortunately, that was also a day that I had a class scheduled and without having a back up instructor, the class had to be canceled. With a program such as Google Docs, perhaps the class could have still been conducted.

But, do I feel that this is the future of office documentation? Not necessarily. Privacy is always a concern when using the web and, all too frequently, problems happen with web pages and servers. And, online documentation programs are not quite perfect. When importing PowerPoint slides to Google Docs, font sizes are not necessarily scaled correctly and URLs run off the pages. Also, Microsoft’s Office Live requires users to agree to many terms and conditions, which can be very intimidating.

Though this technology has not changed how I generate and maintain my documents, it has changed the way I am able to share my work with colleagues (which is worth its weight in kilobytes of space taken up in our email accounts).