Thing 8: Google Calendar

It looks like I haven't been keeping up at all the past couple of weeks, but I did do a post on the main CPD23 blog about being an "older" CPDer (here: http://cpd23.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/cpd-in-your-later-career.html) so I don't feel so guilty.
I'm going to reflect here on Thing 8 Google Calendar and mention another calendar relevant tool, Doodle. The main way I use Google Calendar currently is for a calendar of events on our Second Life island, Infolit iSchool: the calendar is embedded here: http://infolitischool.pbworks.com/w/page/19904113/Calendar-of-events. It hasn't got much on it at the moment (one journal club meeting this month, and a journal club meeting + a report back from the IFLA conference in August).
However it will get busier, as in particular a group of educators from Turkey are going to be using a corner of the island for teaching and discussion. In fact they already have a meeting on the island every Wednesday, so that event will be coming on the calendar pretty soon. At the moment it is mainly just me and Marshall Dozier (a friend at Edinburgh University, the lead organiser for Journal Club) who post things to the calendar. Still, even with that simple function, it is definitely useful.

My university uses Google for mail, docs etc. and the calendar, so a number of colleagues do use Google Calendar to arrange meetings and keep their online diary. The iSchool (my department) also has an account, for departmental meetings (teaching committee, staff-student committee etc.) which is also useful. I'm afraid I am not one of the people who maintains a Google diary, though. I prefer keeping a paper diary (this one, my own copy is also pictured on this page) which I carry round with me in the old fashioned way.

At the moment it seems a hassle to me to always to have to look up something online when I want to make an appointment, but I can see that may change in the future. As it is, one very useful tool that gets used in the iSchool is Doodle: http://doodle.com/. We used to waste lots of time emailing people round to set a date for a meeting, and by the time we'd arrived at a date, usually at least one person couldn't make it any more. Now things get sorted out very quickly by setting up a doodle poll and emailing out the link.