I'm finally starting to solidify the types of things I think would be useful. What I'd like to be able to tap into is the unofficial grapevine that's running around. I'd like to provide a place where students can find out about professors, about classes, and exchange outlines and notes, much like is done in person, should they bump into the right people.

What can I go and easily find right now? Well, the Student Bar Association has put up some outlines, for instance. That's about it. A whopping two professors maintain faculty web sites, and only one of those professors maintains meaningful content there. I can't imagine I'm the only one who's appreciated having access to a syllabus or handouts online. It's not surprising to me that Prof. Travis would be the one doing that if there's only one; I'll probably write about some of her teaching methods in a different post.

And so, here's a list of functions I want to implement:

• Student-provided descriptions of classes
• Key to professor where relevant
• Allow comments
• Tie to outlines, thoughts on exams/assignments, casebooks, study aids, etc.
• Allow postings/comments to be anonymous when desired (note that anonymous doesn't mean anyone can come in and post; I expect it to mean that registered users can post with no record being kept of who did it. This is an important distinction.)
• Student-provided descriptions of professors
• Variations by class where relevant
• Allow comments
• Allow postings/comments to be anonymous when desired (note that anonymous doesn't mean anyone can come in and post; I expect it to mean that registered users can post with no record being kept of who did it. This is an important distinction.)
• Outline repository
• Allow editing (with tracking)
• Allow submitters to prevent editing (for those like Bell, who think they have an outline they can sell)
• No reason for this to be anonymous
• Notes repository
• You never know when you might find some gold nugget in someone else's notes.
• Allow notes to be refined, filled out, etc.
• Allow authors to lock their notes
• General school knowledgebase
• For things like, "Where do we eat?", "What's it like in general?", etc.
• Open, very wiki-like area
• Replicating some of SBA's current ideas
• Job search advice
• Job postings
• Event postings
• Student association sites
• Photo gallery
• Student blog system
• Allow for anonymous blogs
• Allow for class-related blogs
• Syndicate feeds through front-end of system

I think that's the functionality I want. In upcoming posts, I'll break down what systems I think can provide those functions. Getting all of that together will be the easy part. As Sam recently stated so correctly, "[a]s with a lot of these sorts of things, the technical aspects of the problem often end up being dwarfed by the cultural and social parts of the problem."