TWEN is "The West Educational Network" and is a part of the Westlaw drug we're fed as law students. (LexisNexis has something similar -- Web Courses -- but nowhere near as popular.)

It's become pretty common for my professors to use TWEN sites to distribute syllabi, practice hypos, and sometimes much more. This semester, my Con Law professor is forcing the use of the TWEN discussion forums by insisting that everyone post something by the end of January. I can't wait.

The main problem I have with this is that if I'm going to write something up for TWEN, I'd rather post it here. I don't want to copy what I'm responding to; I should really check the terms to see who owns what's posted. I can't meaningfully link to it. Generally, I just don't much care for TWEN. The interface is clunky, as is the case with much of Westlaw and LexisNexis; TWEN, in particular, appears to have been developed by some out-of-work VB programmer, but certainly not by anyone with solid web application development expertise.

But most of all, it eventually vanishes. Wouldn't it be great if all of those discussions were available to future classes? I think so.

Oh well. On a side note, I'm pretty close to being able to automatically post my class notes out of Tinderbox. I've got an agent that writes the WeblogPostID, the sibling order, and quite possibly a few other bits of information (tags or categories) into mt_keywords, which Drupal ignores, anyway. I'll be uploading them as Book pages, so I can set the parent to the node id, which is contained in the WeblogPostID attribute. Eventually, I want to be able to encapsulate links, too. mt_keywords is going to get huge.

I've got the bulk of the first pass at the code done. This weekend, I'll be testing. It's a good thing I finally set up a development Drupal instance.