Comments on Has Anyone Ever Kicked the Printing Habit?

• Not Just Reading But Finding Later On
• Posted by StevenB , AUL at Temple U on July 2, 2010 at 8:30am EDT

• Interesting to read this when just yesterday in a meeting here we were discussing the challenges of supporting student printing in the library - and our soon to be deployed "wireless printing" solution for everyone on a laptop. That's been a big request here - because the students just can't stop printing. Your faculty member has a 100+ slide deck for every class - of course you need to print out every one of them. Need to read those PDFs on the library's e-reserve - of course you need to print out every one of them. I don't doubt this has something to do with wanting the "read anywhere" appeal of paper - and the note taking is important. But to a large extent I think we all want to know where our readings and materials are, and having them physically located in a folder, file cabinet, etc. makes us more secure that we'll be able to find something we need later on when we really need it.

  I managed to get away from this a bit (I won't admit to being totally free of paper - not with that big stack of things to read behind me) with the advent of FURL (remember it?). It didn't just bookmark the link - it captured the full text - and I could add my own keywords and tags. I cut my printing by about 50%. Unfortunately FURL died and we FURL users had our content and accounts shifted to Diigo - which I've come to like - and so far it has been reliable - I can find what I need when I need it. For me that alleviates the need for much of the printing I used to do.

• Posted by Chris on July 2, 2010 at 9:00am EDT

• I have always tried to limit the amount of printing I do. This was a lesson I took from my father's academic career. When he retired he boxed up the contents of five 5-drawer file cabinets full of paper. He's still sorting through it years later.

  I've been fairly successful in not printing stuff. Most printed material I deal with is stuff I've been given my others, rather than stuff I print myself. Given my Dad's experience, I've been particularly conscious of not printing stuff to keep. Anything I print, or get, goes to the recycling bin unless I absolutely need to keep it (either something for the tenure file or something student related that I need to keep). In particular, I try very hard to store journal articles in digital form, rather than on paper.

  One thing I've found that's fairly good at keeping me from printing is just not having a printer in my office. This was not really a calculated decision, my office printer broke last year and I haven't bothered to find a replacement. Now, when I print, I have to go down to the main office to pick it up. This actually isn't too bad for most of the stuff I do still have to print, since it's usually things like tests or syllabi that I would immediately be takind down to the main office to xerox anyway.\

  For most of my non-printing career, I've been doing this without the benefit of any sort of portable reading device like a Kindle or iPad. I've got an iPad now, and I find it quite useful for reading stuff I might have printed (or read on my computer). I don't have any experience with the Kindle, so I can't really compare the two.

  Good luck going paperless!

• Print to PDF + (dropbox OR gmail) = no printing!
• Posted by A on July 2, 2010 at 9:45am EDT

• Luckily most of my meetings are on campus, so I have wireless access during meetings. This alleviates the need for me to print things out to take to meetings - I can just get them from my folders on my netbook or labels in my gmail account.

  If I anticipate being offline, I print items to PDF and pop them into one of my Dropbox folders. It automatically syncs my desktop and my laptop files, so I don't need to remember to transfer the files.

  If I take notes, I usually do that elsewhere - not on a pdf, but in a separate document or to do list.

  I still have to print forms for my department and for handouts, but for the rest of my work, I'm mostly paper-free.

• there is a paperless world out there, just not quite yet
• Posted by John Korkow , Assistant Professor, Department of Alcohol and Drug Studies at University of South Dakota on July 2, 2010 at 10:45am EDT

• Tongue in cheek, there is a paperless world out there, but not quite yet. The comparison I use when students ask why the world is not paperless is this: We have the dead sea scrolls, a print medium on papyrus that survived for almost 2000 years. Computer storage has yet to reach the level of reliability of print media, but is rapidly closing the gap.
  I am almost paperless, and have been for quite some time... some of my tips and guidelines:
  1) Use a flash drive as your "C" drive on your computer. I always save everything of interest, and everything I am creating (excel docs, word docs, pdf's) directly to a flash drive. I backup the flashdrive weekly on the computer's C drive, rather than the other way around. If one keeps music and photos off the flash drive, a 16GB drive will comfortably hold everything for myself, and I have been teaching for 8 years, a minimum of 3 courses a semester. All of my syllabi, online course creations, etc, are on that drive which I carry all the time. If a computer crashes, I simply yank the drive and find a different computer.
  2) Be very disciplined about organizing your files on your computer-- an unlabeled or mislabeled file, paper, syllabus, or what not is a lost one.
  3) Be ruthless about KEEPING everything that you have saved to your flashdrive. This requires a high level of organization so you can find it, but just last year, a student needed an electronic portfolio for a job application, and the materials were 6 years old, and she had lost them in a computer crash. Guess where they were and who had them? Yep, I had them on my flash drive.
  4) Get a pdf printer online so you can "print" anything directly to your flash drive.
  5) Use electronic note taking for any presentation you attend. I never take paper notes, they are easy to lose, hard to read, and I type far faster than I can write. Name the file, and save it on the flashdrive.
  6) Remember this mantra, flashdrive NOT C, flashdrive NOT C. I have many students and friends that I have converted to this, not only does it save paper, but everyone tells me this has saved their virtual "butt" more than once. No more lost work. I have lost nothing in the years since I have switched over. Even more conveniently, I back up the flashdrive to an external harddrive once monthly. We are currently in a minor skirmish over creation rights on a workshop. I have extensive revision documentation going back to 2002 that lives on those backups, and is solid proof that I did the revisions, rather than the "claimed author."

• It is not about printing or not printing....
• Posted by Paper Free Since '93 at Big Government Agency on July 2, 2010 at 3:15pm EDT

• I learned something very early in my academic career--focus on understanding the content/lesson/moral/message and less on trying to scribble it down. Once I gave up taking notes, I found that I was able to retain information much more effectively.

  What does this have to do with printing? Think about WHY you are printing. If you need to review and absorb content away from the computer then a Kindle might work as an alternative to printing. Based on your propensity to get distracted on a PC, I would advise against an Ipad because is has even more toys than a PC.

  But, if you want to retain a tangible copy of what you just read, create a PDF of it and save it in a PDF folder instead (use a good file naming convention… the USB drive suggestion is good too). You will probably find that you don’t go back to them very often, which is what I discovered about my scribbled notes.

  My hard drive recently crashed and I lost years of my PDF odds-and ends. I was annoyed at first, but then I realized:
  1. I didn’t need most of it.
  2. I could find a bulk of it on-line if I really needed it, and it would probably be more current.
  3. I had redundant copies of the really important stuff on back-up/USB drives and CDs (remember them? ;)

  Focus on understanding the content. Even if it is a 100-slide presentation, there are probably only a few salient points that are made. If necessary, retain only those key slides, or a summary outline of the points. You will find that you actually have “learned” that information and can recall it more easily.

  By focusing on “understanding” I also found that I did not have to study for exams since the content was stored in the “understood” cabinet in my brain right next to my understanding that “plants need water,” “cars need gas,” and “don’t open the questionable milk carton.”

  My last point is to actively review your piles of paper and shred/recycle anything that you have electronically. Be ruthless. You will find that it is very cathartic.

• An answer in the cloud?
• Posted by TL , IT at Lane CC on July 2, 2010 at 5:30pm EDT

• I agree with the majority of the comments above, but wanted to ask if anyone has tried tools like Evernote to work on the paperless concept? With almost anytime/anywhere search/retrieval, the idea of my work files and notes in the cloud may be a possibility.

  With mac/win/web/smartphone/ipad clients, ability to save text, voice, pdf, photos, emails, web pages and screen shots, indexing of content including text inside pdfs, and tagging capacity it seems like this might be an option. I'm not saying that I've accomplished nirvana yet, mainly trying to take the important notes during/after meetings but have been trying out the document storage and retrieval. It might be worth the effort of getting things into my account, but not positive on that yet.

  One upside/downside I've noticed is that Evernote enables you to not use discipline (mentioned above) in keeping things organized. It's easier to count on tags and search to find things as needed but some might say that's a negative. There is a limit to amount of storage in the free version though so that forces a bit of discipline, especially with media files. You won't be able to search inside of pdfs for free however.

• @Korkow, that is a very bad strategy
• Posted by Stu on July 2, 2010 at 6:15pm EDT

• John Korkow recommends saving to flashdrive instead of hard drive. Very, very dangerous strategy. It's so easy to lose a flash drive, or have it get corrupted. Save to dropbox instead.

• Posted by Stephen Downes on July 3, 2010 at 10:30am EDT

• The only think I print these days are boarding passes to take with me to the airport. Everything else stays in digital.

  I don't use a Kindle or iPad. I use a much more useful device - a computer. This device (which can have a very large screen on the desktop, or folded up and carried around with you) not only allows you to read stuff, it also allows you to save, annotate, create your own content, and much more.

• Dissertation: Paperless
• Posted by Howard Buddin , Ph.D. Grad Student at Nova Southeastern University on July 3, 2010 at 5:00pm EDT

• I produced the entirety of my dissertation without printing one piece of paper. My committee required printouts of what I had done in the weeks prior to my proposal and final defenses, but that part was unavoidable. I have recently begun chronicling my path to a paperless dissertation on Wordpress.

  https://researchdynamo.wordpress.com/

  Given that I could do this paperless, I see no reason why my entire world couldn't be.

• Posted by mp , Sociology on July 5, 2010 at 3:00pm EDT

• I _hate_ paper - it's heavy, not searchable and never where I need it to be. My system involves a snapscan (http://www.documentsnap.com), and papers on my mac and ipad (http://mekentosj.com/papers/ipad/). Super happy - ipad solves the readability problem.