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.
Adobe Flex Builder is an application for developing rich internet applications using the Flex framework. With this, developers can build intuitive interactive apps quickly. Why would Adobe be doing this? To try and gain some interest from new developers of course. Taking the lead from some fast food joints out there, hit them while at University and get them addicted, especially since some schools will begin offering Flex based training.
With retail prices sitting at $499, why not pick up a free copy for yourself if you are a student or faculty member and test your luck at application development. And hey, grab a copy for your non university friends too, it can sure make a great gift!
By now we realize that some of us really cannot live without social networks. Great places like Facebook keep us in touch with friends and contacts, even though those little applications might distract us from work for an hour or two, its all good.
Stanford University has jumped into the Facebook game and opened up a course for students to learn how to build Facebook Applications. Given that there are a number of people that are developing tools for the social network it seems like a great idea. The course will not focus on building the applications themselves, it will focus on designing persuasive and engaging user experiences within Facebook.
The Stanford course is still in an experimental phase, and will not be rolled out over videocast or podcast sessions like some Stanford courses do until it gets sorted out and fine-tuned. It is being taught by Dave McClure, the well known software developer, angel investor, internet marketer and of 500 hats fame, and BJ Fogg who operates a Stanford lab and runs YackPack an online group connector.
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.
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 .
Adobe is reaching out to students and faculty by offering them Flex Builder 2 for free. 
By now we realize that some of us really cannot live without social networks. Great places like Facebook keep us in touch with friends and contacts, even though those little applications might distract us from work for an hour or two, its all good.
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. 
