I’ve been thinking a lot about how to incorporate technology into one’s life without having it take over your life. This has probably come to the fore as I’m getting ready for teaching in the fall and thinking about cleaning my office. Technology was going to make life easier, right? And yet, it seems like there is digital junk all around, especially on our hard drives.

Are you as sick as I am of logging into your email and having 60 messages waiting for you, before 9am? If so, check out this great post on alternatives to email for collaboration. I wish we could decrease the amount of email sent at my college by using some of these techniques.

Speaking of way too many unnecessary digital files, check out this article on cleaning up your “digital closet”. As someone who was trained as an archivist and has kept up on the discussions around preserving digital media and content, I can say this is a truly timely and important article. Seriously, clean up your files, migrate them if you have to, but for goodness sakes get them off your floppy disks before it’s too late! And junk the stuff you don’t need–there is a delete button for a reason.

So now that you are getting a handle on your “digital closet,” you might want to take a break and have some fun learning about college slang. UCLA has come out with another slang dictionary that can help you translate what students are saying–a very important feat for anyone who interacts with college students.

This last article is on Edupunks. These people are using and engaging with students and technology in fabulous ways to rethink the way people are educated. I think this is fascinating and really opens up a great opportunity for discussion about what are our core values when it comes to higher education.

That’s it for this Wednesday. Have a great day, read lots and the Waki Librarian will be back soon.