Shari's Digital Workspaces

First, I should start out by saying that last fall and spring semesters, I taught Tier 1 Writing (MSU’s freshmen composition) courses here at Michigan State University. In the fall, I taught WRA 150 and in the Spring I taught WRA 140.

In these courses, I use ANGEL, a course management software. Although ANGEL is not perfect (mostly because it “goes down” all of the time), it certainly does an adequate job for the things I use it for. I use ANGEL to update my course syllabus, post readings, and have students upload papers. For these purposes, ANGEL is great, but I don’t find it particularly useful for other things. In terms of other technology that I utilize in my course, my students learn to use audacity, imovie, windows movie maker, flickr, and youtube. They learn these particular technologies by breaking off into groups and each group presenting on one of these in order to learn some of the technology they will be using in their “Remix” projects.

In terms of everyday technology use, I interact with my email on an hourly basis- I am almost always checking my email if I'm at my computer. I have both my work ad hobby email coming through (I get lots of emails about horse stuff come through), which blurs my work/play lines. MSU’s email system is terrible, so I have all of my mail forwarded to my yahoo account (which I have customized to be pink:). Yahoo has been really, really good to me in terms of mail delivery, etc.

Most days, I use two computers: my laptop (my main computer), and my boyfriend’s PC, which is a faster computer that can handle things like playing tv shows on hulu while checking my email. That computer is most often used for playing shows on hulu while I write stuff on my laptop. This is because my boyfriend is a gamer (Battlefield and Halo, mostly) and I need some background noise while writing.

I have an assistantship at MSUs Writing Center this summer. This assistantship allows me to do research with a good friend, Soo Kim, and we have often done pieces of writing (our IRB, questionnaires, consent forms, etc.) via googledocs. I also work as a consultant at the Writing Center, and will have scheduled Second Life appointments as Mikey does. My avatar on Second Life has had a pretty boring life thus far because I am not a Second Life aficionado (my “first life” often feels like too much to handle!).

The final photo is of my home workspace- you’ll notice the two monitors, horse show ribbons and what seems like serious disorganization (but is really just organized chaos). This is how I work best- with a stack of papers to go through/work on, because without some sort of pressure, I am not very motivated- thus the chaos serves a purpose (but don't talk to my boyfriend about tis- he would disagree!). Thus you'll notice the pile at my feet and the pile on the printer.

Happy working, everyone!