School starts a month from today

gregh — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 22:45:39 -0500

First day of classes is August 20, 2007. The first day of my last year.

Have I gotten everything done I wanted to this summer? No.

My paper's not done; I've been suffering from serious writer's block. Outside a bunch of short pieces about like those that have been posted to the blog, I've gotten nowhere.

I haven't done any more work on expanding my site to allow for more collaboration among my fellow students. In part, it's because it's a lot of work. In larger part, I'm just not sure getting folks at school to use a collaborative application surrounding law school would be successful. It sits at around the same state it was in at this time last summer. That's unfortunate. Among other things, wouldn't it be nice if there was a good place for people to go to and ask, "Didn't you have London for Legal Ethics?" or "Have you had Markham for Antitrust?" (For me, the answers are no and yes, with the follow-on that while I did horribly in Antitrust, it was a great class, I feel like I learned a lot, and I've mostly chalked it up to a bad exam.) Instead, students are forced to ask around, email around, and in the end in many cases, just take a chance.

That brings me to my anti-Facebook rant. I've now taken the time to explore the API and programming environment a bit. It's really not that bad. Why do I bring that up? Because I could see how Facebook could be a reasonable way to share that information. The current system for entering courses is pretty raw for law school purposes. Among major flaws, there's not a law subject, and you can't add a course without a subject. It doesn't track the professor for the course. And because it seems to be aimed only at finding current students in a class, after you add courses, you can see a roster; however, once you complete a course, it removes it, doesn't ask any questions about it, and it just goes away.

That may be an opportunity for trying to write a Facebook application. First, of course, I'd have to get myself more interested in Facebook. Second, I'd have to find the time to do the server-side work needed to get that far (or learn more about the API to discover I wouldn't have to do that.) Third, it would be nice if one could actually determine who was actually a law student at USF from the goofy categorization scheme Facebook uses. In short, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Why? Well, it's July 20. School starts in a month!

Otherwise Occupied - collaboration

School starts a month from today