Faculty Development and Diversity

It's a researcher's nightmare: you are close to completing a large project, and your computer crashes, taking the data or the analysis with it.

Graduate student John Boldt thought he could avoid the problem by storing his nearly finished thesis on a laptop and a backup on an external hard drive. He left them in his car when he went for a run. When he came back, both copies were stolen.

Sometimes when I lose a piece of writing I'm working on, it's a blessing in disguise. I'm forced to go back and recreate my thoughts. The second time is usually more succinct. Still, I don't like that feeling of seeing all my efforts get deleted.

I back up on a shared drive, but usually only once a week. I've also tried thumb drives to ferry files back and forth between my work and home computer. There's an on-line service called Dropbox that gives users 2GB free storage on the cloud. I'm not sure there's a single best way to back up as long as it becomes a consistent habit.

Between the Mentoring Task Force, the Faculty Development and Diversity Committee, the Awards Committee, focus groups, journal clubs, and working groups, it seems like I spend a significant chunk of time scheduling meetings. Everyone is so busy that finding that golden hour when all the participants are available can be impossible.

So far, my technological solution has been to use Doodle. The free version allows users to set up several potential meeting days and times and then generates a link to a grid. All the invited attendees can add their availability by checking boxes. Doodle tallies up the yeses, and highlights the slot that most people can attend.

I recently heard about an alternative called Tungle.me. The website works in much the same way, but with far more powerful features. It allows you to link to Facebook and Twitter profiles and to sync with Outlook or iCalendar features to automatically avoid conflicts. Of course, to get those robust options, users have to sign up and download an application that connects to their calendar software. That may be more work than I can expect busy academics to perform.

Ideally, Outlook would incorporate these features and mesh seamlessly with the Department's room scheduler. Until then, I'll probably stick with Doodle.