I’m a bit late picking up on this thread but I was so thrilled to find it. I’m pretty new to Web 2.0 but I love this angle of a blog being a student’s course file. My area is music and to be able to have live links (to iTunes for 30″ at least) is awesome for essay/reports – and no need for html – server blah -blah. In fact I’m going to try very hard to never write a ms word document again.

What I continue to wonder about it which of these really cool, potentially really important services need to be done in house (would be better done in house, etc. – however you want to word it really) and which can we leave to the world? I also continue to believe that there really is no way to keep up with the next cool tool phenomena – they are just exploding and some serve niches but are really valuable to that niche constituency.

What I’d like to do is develop a discovery tool for mapping PSU Id to Cool-Web-Service Id to make tool sharing somewhat easier. We can’t predict who is going to use what tools but we can make it easier to find each other if groups or subsets of groups are already using a tool but may not even know it. I’ve tried to define the problem at http://www.personal.psu.edu/kxm/aa.pdf – still working on the storyboard for the sol’n.

What I continue to wonder about it which of these really cool, potentially really important services need to be done in house (would be better done in house, etc. – however you want to word it really) and which can we leave to the world? I also continue to believe that there really is no way to keep up with the next cool tool phenomena – they are just exploding and some serve niches but are really valuable to that niche constituency.

What I’d like to do is develop a discovery tool for mapping PSU Id to Cool-Web-Service Id to make tool sharing somewhat easier. We can’t predict who is going to use what tools but we can make it easier to find each other if groups or subsets of groups are already using a tool but may not even know it. I’ve tried to define the problem at http://www.personal.psu.edu/kxm/aa.pdf – still working on the storyboard for the sol’n.

I think a person’s digital presence tends to be scattered across the net. They might have a facebook account, photos in flickr, links in del.icio.us, a personal blog, perhaps even a work related blog and/or a school related blog. Cole, you talk about people wanting to own this digital presence, not be locked into a university based system and not be splitting their efforts across multiple on-line spaces.

I like the idea of a personal hub: A page that could collects the various content on-line related to a person. This is a page a person could own that could link to the various types of content I mentioned above, as well as aggregate the content via syndication mechanisms.

The university system can provide a safe and reliable haven for learning and teaching , while other services can do what they do best, which is not necessarily related to academics. There can be a third type of service that acts the personal glue between the others. I don’t see this glue being a service provided by the educational institution.

One service that already does something like this is claimID. Although it doesn’t do the aggregation of syndicated content.

Here is an example of a claimID page: http://claimid.com/fred
I don’t think the claimID page is designed to be very dynamic, which is one of its shortcoming, IMHO.

This doesn’t answer the question of what happens to a student’s on-line work once they graduate. That’s a whole other can of worms.