Rosina is a first-year student at university and is majoring in business. She has come to university directly from school and towards the end of the first semester she feels overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that she has to deal with. She feels that if it does not get any better, she will have to reduce the number of units she is taking.

Each of the four units she is taking having provides down loadable files from Web sites. These files include the unit outline, notes and PowerPoint slides and on-line readings. Although she has saved these on disks to work at home on the family computer, she is not sure which disks include which files. She is frequently in a panic thinking she has lost or deleted one of the many files downloaded. She has also generated a number of files related to the units she is taking. In lectures, she takes notes in a note pad and then when she gets home, she expands on them using the textbook. She does not have much time to relate her notes with the PowerPoint slides which the lecturers have provided.

She is dreading the exam period as she is unclear whether to use the textbook, the notes she has made or the slides.

The assignments she has completed to date have been a real rush but at least she managed to get a pass mark in each one. She would like to make her reports more graphic - she has used the word processor to input the text, but any diagrams have been hand-drawn because she does not know how to use the drawing features of the word processor.

Rosina gathered quite a few hand-outs during the week before semester started. Some are related to study skills, some the library, some on the use of the media studies section. A lot of hand-outs were picked up on the various societies and sports teams at the university. All of the paper hand-outs are sitting in a pile on her bedroom desk as she has just not had the time to go through them and file them away. She has been tempted to throw all of them away but feels she may need one of them at some point in the future. It seems that every time she checks her access file (personal file in a filing cabinet) at the university she has yet another piece of paper many of which are unrelated to her studies.

Last week Rosina decided to skip a few lectures because she felt she was getting bogged down with information.

One of her assessments is a group assignment. The team of four have met six times over the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the meetings have not been very productive. Only two of the meetings have been attended by all four.

One high point of the semester has been Rosina getting familiar with email. She has an email account with the university and receives emails from lecturers, other students, friends, mail groups, and an on-line travel company as well as junk mail on investing (she is not really interested in this at the moment).

She sometimes gets 30 emails a day and although she was quite pleased to get so many emails she now sighs when she accessed her email account and finds so many waiting. There are many days when she does not have the time to look at them all. She now has over 500 emails resting in her in-box with about 20 of them unopened. She feels there must be a better way to handle all of these. Many of her friends will email her and ask what she is doing that evening.

Rosina is quite positive in relation to using computer technology and information systems but thinks if she can just get through the semester, she will be able to take a course or two to help her get organised. She will be taking a unit in information systems during semester two but is not sure whether it will help her get organised on a personal level.

Rosina has met many people during the first 8 weeks of semester but unfortunately, she as lost many of their contact details. She usually writes their name and phone number and email address on a scrap of paper which invariably gets lost before she arrives home. She thought that at then of semester she would work on a contacts database - nothing too fancy - since she has had a lecturer and tutorial on setting up a database as part of her information systems unit. However, she is unsure whether this would be worth the time since she is unlikely to know thousands of people!

Information seems to be coming at her from different sources: lectures, students, friends, through email, by paper, telephone, and lectures. Rosina did not experience this feeling when she was a school. She basically knew everyone and did not have anywhere near as much information to manage. She did not even use email in those days. Sometimes she feels she was better off then - life was simpler!

Please answer the following questions:

Question 1.

What are the main problem areas that Rosina is faced with? Explain in detail.

Question 2.

What can Rosina do to manage the information she getting more effectively? Justify your answer.

Question 3.

Analyse Rosina's attitude towards technology and information systems.

Question 4.

Have you experienced anything in common with Rosina? Did you manage to overcome it? How?

pur-new-sol

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