What were your goals for using Spark?

1. To easily share and work on documents with colleagues at Tufts.
2. Be able to work on documents at Tufts, Simmons College, and home without having to drag the files with me or keep track of the files. Too often I found myself asking: Is the latest version of this document on my thumb drive or P drive?
3. Use an environment that allows me to manage a lot of information (relatively speaking) easily without dealing with the overhead of applications like MS Access.

I learned how to use Spark by diving in and setting up a personal wiki space and learning by trial and error. I got used to Spark fairly quickly; I used the online manuals to look up specific tasks.

What impact did using Spark have on your goals?

I use Spark for my work at the DCA and for my professional activities work. At the DCA we use Spark to manage a variety of projects. For example, we are using Spark to organize, consolidate, and update our policies and procedures. We are working towards managing all of our polices and procedures in the wiki. We plan on using Spark's view changes feature to manage the versions of our policies and procedures, which are important for us to document.

We've found that Spark is an easier environment for a group of people to share and work on documents than the usual Windows file storage (P & Q drive) environment. It's particularly helpful for sharing and working on documents with members of the Tufts community outside of one's own department.

I primarily use my personal wiki space to keep track of the professional literature I've read and should read--making a page for each article, report, book, etc. Ideally, once I've read a resource, I'll put some notes about it in its respective wiki page. I have over 400 entries (far too many are in the "to read" category). I tag each of entries with subject terms that I have made up for myself.

I use Spark to keep track of my readings and assignments for the course I teach as an instructor and the course I take as a student at the Graduate School of Library and Information School at Simmons College. I tie my course wiki pages to the professional literature pages I described above using links and tags; that has been very useful.

The Wiki's label tool has been very useful for me, its basically the way I manage my professional readings. We use the version control features to manage our policies and procedures at the DCA. I like being able to hop back and forth between editing in the rich text and wiki markup modes. I also attach documents to some of my wiki pages, which has also proved to be very useful.

How do you hope to use Spark in the future?

I will make more wiki pages and become more dependent on my wiki. I want to move away from my P, Q, C, and thumb drives and have as much of my work as possible centered on the wiki.

"I am the University Records Manager and mange the records management program which is part of the Digital Collections and Archives (DCA). I help offices across the University manage their records and develop a variety of records management policies."

To easily share and work on documents with colleagues at Tufts.
To be able to work on documents from any location without having to drag the files with me.
Use an environment that allows me to manage a lot of information easily.

To find out more about how Eliotuses SparkWikis email him at eliot.wilczek@tufts.edu

For more information on how Spark tools can be used to achieve your teaching, learning, and research goals email spark@tufts.edu or call 7-2859.