If you've been to college sometime in the past decade, you might have run up against Blackboard. It's an online assignment system that students generally dread logging into, because it usually means new work or more brown-nosing questions from that showoff in your class. That's not Blackboard's fault, though. To show they want to make things easier on their user base, the students, Blackboard is now on Facebook with an app called Blackboard Sync.
A quick Google search shows that some colleges have been hacking together their own mashups of Blackboard and Facebook, which suggests to us that there's already a demand for this product. Granted, the move could have come sooner: now that Facebook is increasingly used by middle-aged PR officers who want to network -- heard of LinkedIn, guys? -- a lot of users are going to pass this by. For the college kids who still log into Facebook every day and use it as a primary mode of communication with friends, this is great. While you're making plans to go out drinking at the nearest fraternity, take a quick look at the Blackboard app to make sure you won't wake up with a last-minute assignment to finish.
The business of Facebook application development has been dying off because nobody wants to lace their profile with annoying pirates, ninjas, mummies, or whatever the latest trend is. Applications that actually have value to Facebook's natural demographic are scarce, so we hope Blackboard will turn out to be useful for students and set an example of what Facebook apps could be doing.
Google Maps is all well and good if you're trying to find directions for your road trip across America. But what if you're a freshman in college and you can never seem to remember how to get from the dining hall to the library? Campus Destinations is a new college-centric map/search engine that can help you on your way.
The service includes listings for academic, residential and other buildings on a handful of US university campuses. There are also listings for nearby restaurants and other destinations. You can find directions from one spot to another by entering items like "art building," and "library" rather than street addresses. Currently 10 university campuses are covered, but we're hoping to see more added soon.
Communiversity is a new site which allows students of various colleges to post pictures and comments on their own school. Though opinions on the site can vary greatly and maybe leave visitors more confused than informed, this new service is an interesting and creative way to find out a little more about your next potential college.
College.SparkNotes and Collegeboard are two other sites to visit if you're researching new places to get those degrees. These sites are great sources of concrete information like tuition estimates, average SAT scores of attending students, majors offered, etc, and SparkNotes even conducts surveys on the general experience. But the sites still lack in information on the real student experience.
That's why Communiversity exists. Every school's page is managed entirely by students, so future undergrads get the info right from the horses mouthes. The site also allows students to upload pictures, so it's likely visitors will see portions of the campus less advertised. Though the new site is still small relative to its potential, news of Communiversity is spreading fast.
Social networks are huge, and Yahoo knows this, that's why they have been working hard to develop the next level of social networks, KickStart.
Yahoo! KickStart is aimed at matching college students with relevant employers. This new service will give users a profile page where they can post a resume similar in style to LinkedIn. The companies listed in the service can then start up groups which users can join, start a discussion and hopefully get hired.
The service is still in a concept only phase, and might never make it to launch. Sounds like it could defiantly be a good way for students to enter the job market, we hope something comes out of this study.
With some students already in school, and some preparing to enter yet another journey into a new semester, let DLS make your studies that much more organized with a few free desktop and web applications that will make your school life that much more enjoyable.
From free document creation applications, online to-do's and organization applications, users are faced with a decision, go for the costly desktop versions and upgrade every few years, or stay ahead of the curve with free web based applications that are constantly updating with new growing feature sets. The choice has never been easier.
This DLS special feature lists out current tools that are floating around the web as highly competitive alternatives for both students and professionals.
Headed back to campus for fall? Our new little sister DIY Life shows you a way to create your own perfect dorm room; online. Don't find yourself stuck in a drab, uninspiring space -- in which you'll spend far too much time in front of your computer -- kick it up a notch and impress your friends.
Homeslyce The really slick part is, you can collaborate with your new roommate from where ever you are. Oh the internet, is there anything it can't do?
In 2002, it was all doom and gloom for aspiring computer science students. They were being told that, by the time they graduated, offshore developers and computer scientists would be doing the jobs they sought, and for far less money. Sure, it may have been true for a while, and lots of development is still happening overseas but, did you realize Comp-Sci grads are still raking in bigger paychecks?
The median starting salary for class of '06 comp-sci majors is $42,000, compared with an average of $40,800 across all other fields. Unfortunately, the trend is going down, and students graduating today are starting far behind what the alumni ahead of them took home right out of school.
Of course, you could skip class altogether and place your bets on starting the Next Big Thing®, cash out big and head for the Bahamas.
Applying for college or graduate school can be a nerve-wracking experience. You spend all this time and money filling out your application and financial aid forms and send them off to begin the waiting game, only to spend that time wondering if there's some other amazing school you forgot to apply to.
Campus Explorer makes it a lot easier to research colleges and universities. Want to go to school in Chicago? Just enter a city, region, or zip code, and Campus Explorer will spit out a list of universities with basic information like the average annual tuition. You can also search by degree type or field of study.
Want to find out more about a particular institution? Click on a university to read an overview from Wikipedia, a "mission statement," and statistics about part time and full time enrollment, how many students live on or off campus, how many receive financial aid, the breakdown of male to female students. You can also see the application fee, acceptance rate, and what scores the institution expects on standardized tests.
Oh yeah, there's information about courses of study as well.
You can still get much more detailed information for most colleges and universities by visiting their homepages directly. But Campus Explorer is a great place to start your college search, as it gives you most of the information you need all in one place.
The only thing that would make the site better is a space for users to leave comments about various schools. This would probably have to be a highly moderated feature in order to keep trolls from bashing rival schools. But it'd be nice to get a sense of what actual students think .
The RIAA warns it will go after college students with a renewed vigor, and indeed the organization has sent letters to hundreds of students at 13 U.S. universities in recent weeks demanding a steep financial settlement and warning students of coming federal lawsuits if settlements aren't addressed quickly and paid in full. The average cost of defending against an RIAA lawsuit ranges into the tens of thousands of dollars, even though evidence of any wrong-doing presented may be flimsy at best.
Many people are now heading back to school, for the fall semester. A new service aims to make the learning experience a socially-sharable one. NoteMesh is a collaborative wiki-like way for students to share their class notes, helping other students who missed a day, are out "sick" or help for exams and term-papers. Finally the collective knowledge of the masses is put to good use in the classroom. I could see online-only students benefiting from the service as well, since the service caters to students who are online anyway. One thing I don't like about the service is that you can't use it if you don't have and use your school's provided email account. I understandd the need for authentication, but they can't possibly verify that each person is a part of a certain class anyway, so what's the point?
Last night social networking heavy hitter Facebook got a significant update in the form of the News Feed. The News Feed is a sort of dashboard that consolidates all of the recent updates relevant to you, e.g. your friends' profile changes, new members of your groups, new events, photos, and so on. Though I'm disappointed that there's no actual feed in the RSS/Atom sense, I am pretty impressed with the interface. Each category has a unique icon, e.g. a heart (or broken heart) for relationship status changes, a calendar icon for events, a flag for political issues, and so on. It also puts the full text of wall posts and thumbnails of photos right there in the feed. In addition to the News Feed, every user's profile now features a Mini-Feed which shows all of their recent activity.
The News Feed basically condenses all the day-to-day information that Facebook power-users would have spent a lot of time clicking around for into a single page, which is essentially the opposite of what MySpace does. MySpace takes advantage of poor design and endless clicks to maximize pageviews at the expense of usability. Facebook seems to have taken a stand against that sort of pageview inflation and made user convenience its first priority. Sorry for hating on MySpace, but it's really refreshing to see someone else do it right.
Social video sharing powerhouse YouTube has taken a tentative step into Facebook's neighborhood with the introduction of Colleges on YouTube. The new Colleges feature provides closed communities for students, staff, and alumni of a number of U.S. colleges and universities to share videos only with their fellow students, staff, and alumni. Like Facebook, to gain access to a college's YouTube site, you must have an email address from that school. It also promises Facebook-like groups for people in the same student organizations or who share interests. Right now the services is limited to 30 major colleges and universities. As with Facebook, the social implications of this are interesting. It's only a matter of time before students begin posting videos that are potentially embarrassing, if not incriminating, including videos of other students who might not have given their (sober) consented to being taped. In all likelihood we're on the verge of a flurry of editorials describing employers who have turned down promising young graduates, students getting disciplinary action, and parents getting all in a huff over things seen on YouTube. But it'll be fun to watch.
Check out the full list of schools currently on YouTube after the jump.
If you've been to college sometime in the past decade, you might have run up against Blackboard. It's an online assignment system that students generally dread logging into, because it usually means new work or more brown-nosing questions from that showoff in your class. That's not Blackboard's fault, though. To show they want to make things easier on their user base, the students, Blackboard is now on Facebook with an app called Blackboard Sync.
Headed back to campus for fall? Our new little sister 
In 2002, it was all doom and gloom for aspiring computer science students. They were being told that, by the time they graduated, offshore developers and computer scientists would be doing the jobs they sought, and for far less money. Sure, it may have been true for a while, and lots of development is still happening overseas but, did you realize Comp-Sci grads are still raking in bigger paychecks?
