Having just come from our second meeting with Joe’s staff I believe I can confidently say we have come face to face with Dallas’ “wild frontier.”

Our second meeting introduced us to some new figures at Joe’s that work with the files in a much more hands-on capacity than the administrators we spoke with two weeks ago. We had a brief discussion on their views regarding many of the same needs and organizational challenges, but the bulk of our time was spent delving into the loose network of external hard drives, and individual work stations where their files are stored. We spent more than an hour doing this, but it honestly felt like just a glimpse of the larger picture.

From what I saw there appeared to be three approaches to the organizational structure.

1. Working folders: These were wildly inconsistent in their filenames, file locations, and hierarchical folder structure. In a few cases there was evidence that instructors had grouped certain types of work into folders by student name, but this practice was sporadic at best. These working areas were scattered in many places, both on the individual workstation hard drives, and the external drives that we were told were for backup. We were told that any organization of files in these areas was influenced by a combination of the instructor and the student’s organizational habits.
2. Back up folders: These literally had names like “TTP 2015 PHOTO/VIDEO DUMP”. I got the impression that these were more or less one for one backups without any attempt to examine the contents.
3. Curated folders: These folders had consistent naming structure and were found in several different drives. The apparent purpose of them appears to be retrospectively gather high value content from the current semester’s classes in order to make them easier to find.

My first thoughts after this meeting is that policy is going to be a big part of the solution for them. They currently have no guidelines that they give instructors or staff. This simple measure would go a long way towards establishing consistent practices. To aid in that capacity they could probably take advantage of many OS level features that would help them tighten control over certain areas. For example, they could give students read/write permission to only a single folder with their name on it in order to ensure all of a student’s work was contained in a logical location. Even if the student’s own organizational habits were lax these habits would not contaminate any other areas.