Reducing the Digital Clutter

Hello, and welcome to a special Wednesday edition of Tuesdays.

That's right -- just when you started to get comfortable with the security blanket of a blog that appears every Tuesday, I went and flipped it on you, coming to you a day late this week!

I don't have long to write today, as I'm off to Oak Park elementary school to work with a teacher who is interested in having her students create video projects. The past week, which has been busy busy busy -- as always -- the prevalent theme seems to have been making videos. Since I last wrote, on the day of our video podcast project with the visiting German exchange students, the Academic Integration Coaches have been receiving lots of requests to help teachers and students make videos using the equipment at our disposal. This is partly due to the success of the breakout session on podcasting from the October 11 in-service day for teachers of grades 4-6.

This has been a great challenge for us, because our students and teachers use a wide variety of means of capturing video, from different types of digital cameras and video cameras to video screen capture applications. We have been trying our best to help them use many different types of video files, including .avi, .mov, .mpeg, .wmv, .mp4, and more, bringing them in to the video editor on our district image, Windows Movie Maker, which is very limited in what types of files it can import and export. There have been several roadblocks. Some people record a high definition video that can't be imported into MovieMaker, but can be edited on a Mac using iMovie. Since iMovie is very simplified and limited these days, some people would like to take the videos they create in iMovie and move them into Movie Maker, to take advantage of the transitions, titles, and ability to split clips. Other want to take a video created in Movie Maker and import it into iMovie to use some of the better features of that program, but that has surprisingly been difficult as well. Here I thought I could import anything into a Mac program, but that has not proved to be the case, as Mac applications do not like to use .wma files.

We've found some good online video converters, such as Hamster, but we have not always been successful. It seems the free video converters still lag behind the ability of the free online audio converters right now.

One of the most frequent problems, once we've gotten past the file conversion issues, is that video editing takes a lot of organization. It's not just about planning the shooting of video, having a working script and a sense of blocking and camera angles, it's all the elements that go in to the editing process that can cause a clutter. Videos -- even short ones -- have still images, video clips, transisitons, titles, overdubbed audio tracks, and many more elements that all need to be saved as files. Once a project is finished and turned in to a video, I like to go back into all the folders I used in the project and delete the files. I know it might come back to haunt me if I find a mistake and need to edit it, because then I'd have to recreate the project. But videos and all their assosciated files take up a lot of space. I've found that if I don't clean up after my mess relatively soon after finishing the project, things can get very cluttered.

This digital clutter is not limited to video editing. There is our work log in a spreadsheet that comes to us in email and in a Google form, which constantly needs updating. As we become more and more busy with requests to work with teachers in our district, tracking these requests, taking action on them, logging them as complete or in-progress, etc., gives us a lot of data to sort through.

Since my last entry, the AICs worked with a few dozen teachers during the school day, and facilitated a flex training session called "Stop Showing Videos, Start Making Them" for another 20 teachers. We each co-taught classes where students used Wikispaces, made non-linear PowerPoints, published blogs, linked to audio files, and made videos. Keeping track of the files assosciated with all of this work (let alone logging it for our record-keeping) can become an overwhelming task if the three of us don't work in concert to stay on top of it.

Later today, I will be participating in a 21st Century Learning chat on teaching network literacy. I am hoping a large part of this discussion will center on organzinational strategies for files in a network.

On November 8, Wendy and I will be working with teachers on organizing their files when we present training on Microsoft Office applications during an in-service day.

All of these thoughts came together for me when I made this week's Tech Tip of the Week podcast this morning. Today's topic was reducing digital clutter, influenced by the Inbox Zero movement started by Merlin Mann.

In a nutshell, clutter is distracting. Whether it is literal papers on a desk or electronic files on a desktop, I've found my eye goes too quickly to the clutter when I'm working, and I start thinking of many things not related to the task at hand. If my inbox is filled with old messages I've saved as "reminders" of things I need to do later, I can't avoid thinking briefly about each of them every time I open my mail. However, if I use my inbox as a queue for decision-making instead of a colelction of tasks, the clutter disappears. In other words, I am learning to make a decision about every message as soon as I get it.

That doesn't mean I have to instantly reply, though I often do. But instead of having it languish in my inbox, I decide what to do with the content of the message. Maybe I need to make a task or appointment in my calendar to tackle the task at an assigned time down the road. Maybe I need to save the email or its attached files. Maybe I need to reply. Maybe I just need to delete it. The point is that I make the decision, and clear out my inbox. The same goes for electronic files, which I am careful to place in a clear system of folders, and paper files on my desk, which are thankfully becoming fewer as my colleagues and I learn how to use less paper.

Merlin Mann and many others have been blogging and tweeting about this topic. Just do a search for "inbox zero" and you'll see a lot of interesting discussions and ideas on the subject.

My podcast for reducing electronic clutter can be found here.

Thanks for dropping by. Talk at ya next week!