College Students Using Social Networking Sites for Note Taking

I’m a big fan of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook because they make college campuses and other communities smaller and more enjoyable. While they do pose some dangers to students who post too much information about themselves, they are provide wonderful opportunities for students to connect with people who have like interests.
Shannon Seery of Exceler8 just told me about a social networking site that I had not heard of and I have to admit is pretty interesting. stu.dicio.us allows students to swap and collaborate on notes they take in their college classes. It has wiki capabilities, so the notes that one person takes can be edited by another person and further edited by third, fourth, etc. people. My experience with wiki sites like the encyclopedia site Wikipedia is that all of that collaborative editing tends to produce documents that are polished and well researched. You may occasionally see a document that contains biased and perhaps even objectionable information, but wiki sites with a lot of traffic are amazingly self-correcting.
And to think that when I went to college 100 years ago I was thrilled to have access to a desktop computer…