randomosity

Brows­ing about through one of my Blue Dot friend’s addi­tions, I read through an inter­est­ing art­icle list­ing some edu­ca­tion 2.0 sites. One of them is called stud.icio.us a site tied in with Face­book that provides a place to share notes with fel­low stu­dents. The site makes good use of AJAX and is in the pro­cess of trans­ition­ing to its own v2. I played a round with the beta site and found it intriguing. It auto­mat­ic­ally matches you with class­mates and provides a means to man­age your assign­ment dates and other such dead­lines. It offers places to share mater­ial bey­ond notes and obvi­ously will set off some alarm bells for edu­cat­ors as to room for abuse.

1. Will stu­dents stop attend­ing class and rely on note­takers to carry them through?
2. Will mater­ial bey­ond notes such as essay out­lines and poten­tially full essays be avail­able for use?
3. Are these all bad things?
4. Would they hap­pen through other means anyway?
5. Does simply mak­ing shar­ing in an elec­tronic format make abuse happen?
6. How does this make things any dif­fer­ent from pro­fess­ors mak­ing lec­ture notes available?
7. What about Podcasts?

I have to admit I find the col­lab­or­at­ive pos­sib­il­it­ies rife with poten­tial and equally prone to abuse by those look­ing for the easy way out. Per­haps one of the bet­ter aspects of this rather pub­lic approach is just that…it is public.