I've been thinking recently about how the Internet has changed the way in which I work. I work from a variety of different desks in FCH and Park Learning Centres, and having the networked (N:) drive available to me is great - it means that I can save work on one PC and then open it from another. But the Internet means that I can be even more flexible than that, and work from home as well.
I started off by saving important documents (assignments etc) as attachments in my email. This meant that they were available from anywhere with an Internet connection, so I could work on them from home or at the University. It also meant that if my disk got corrupted or my PC exploded (I tend to be a bit paranoid!) the work would still be available.
More recently I have started to use GoogleDocs in a similar way. It is an online word processing/spreadsheet program, which means that any document saved into your account can be accessed from any Internet-connected PC. But it has a couple of big advantages over the email attachment idea.
Firstly, you can edit the documents online and then save them, which means you are always looking at the most up-to-date version.
And secondly, you can invite other people to view your documents and even give them permission to edit the documents. This is great if you are working collaboratively on something - it means everyone is always working on the most recent version, it allows you to see changes as they are being made, and it makes it far easier to edit things like typos without disturbing everyone in the group.
Darren, John and I have used GoogleDocs extensively in the preparation of this module: one of us will create a document containing course materials for a particular week, and the others will add suggestions and comments and correct any typing mistakes. I would certainly recommend it to you, and I'm sure Darren and John would agree. Have a look at http://docs.google.com for more information.
