So I was sitting in my “Emerging Technologies” class last night and we began discussing a colleagues recent trip to England. During her travels we communicated several times through Skype and I followed her blog posts and checked out her Google map. The conversation last night however was about computing in the cloud.  For those thinking my head is in the cloud right about now, cloud computing is where all you need to get to your information (email, documents, contacts, etc.) is a computer connected to the Internet.

My friend talked about moving to Gmail and how it was a different mindset because Google doesn’t allow you to create folders but instead uses labels (which are like tags). I have a Gmail account because I use Reader and Google Docs but I never explored it and didn’t see the benefits of having yet another account. Well based on our conversation, I began to explore the possibilities and power of Gmail and I decided to live in the cloud for awhile to see what happens. I experimented with Google docs last year and didn’t always have a strong connection at school which made note taking more difficult (this has since improved).

So now, the experiment begins. I have set-up Gmail to accept two outside accounts (which will be labeled when they come in) and I can send email from Gmail but it will arrive as if from another domain. I am excited about the ability to tag email like I do delicious tags and to follow an email conversation without all the forwards and replies mixed in. I like the idea of managing one account that doesn’t depend on me to constantly update software. I also like the fact that I can retrieve my email from any computer in the world.

There are other reasons for my decision too. I am considering what cloud computing means in the academy and how that might change education as we know it. Google is responsible for redundancy, spam filtering, and the cost of the equipment while I am responsible for making the most of my data. I also login once and have access to mail, docs, reader and a host of other great tools. I know I am putting a lot in one place but if it simplifies my life, isn’t it worth it?