A new online tool called stu.dicio.us could revolutionize the way law students manage and share their class notes. Here's how Chris Gilmer at Download Squad sums up stu.dicio.us:

stu.dicio.us has the potential to become a students dream. It's an online note taking site. Students can publicly save notes and manage class schedules.[...]

Schedules are easily entered, tracking class name, day, time, school, and professor. You can also input to-dos, which make it easy to remember things that you have to do for the day. The Notes section in stu.dicio.us is pretty powerful. Users can search for notes in the database based on their particular subject or class. Making it extremely useful if you forgot or missed something from a lecture. Notes in the system can be exported in HTML or DOC formats for viewing, storing and printing.

I know this would've made my law school life easier. Study group members will be able to easily share notes with one another, and the process of obtaining notes from a missed class period might be simplified considerably. Best of all, everything a student needs to stay organized all semester long can now be stored in one location-independent space.

Last night, I witnessed a fine example of the web's power for current awareness and knowledge management...

I attended a local meeting for new and prospective members of a national organization. As new people walked in, one of the officers asked each person how they had heard about the meeting. It seems she had sent out over 200 postcard invitations for the meeting and was curious as to the mail campaign's effectiveness. Well, of the 20 or 30 of us in attendance, only one said they had received a postcard. The rest of us all said we had heard about the meeting from the group's website, a fact that seemed to genuinely surprise her.

The most notable thing of all was that this was not a uniformly young group of people. All age groups were represented, and the age of the person appeared to have little or no influence on how they had learned about the meeting.

Something to think about for librarians weighing the value of a print newsletter of library news versus a blog with the same information. The blog solution offers a far more portable, convenient, and enduring solution. After all, most people will toss their print newsletter after a quick read, but if the information is posted to a blog, that same person can refer to the information today, tomorrow, next month,and next year.