School information stream

This doesn't have anything to do with development(edit: turns out it is development related), but I've been thinking about the way things at Seneca work and a lot has crossed my mind, so I figure this is the best place to discuss it since it pertains to the school in general.

I've noticed that every semester, I'm trying to think up a new scheme on how to keep everything from all of my classes organized on my computer. In the end though, I'm still going to 6+ different web pages trying to pull little bits of information all into a central location so that when I'm sitting at home, I don't have to waste time trying to figure out what's due coming up, I can just look and say "[x] class has [y] due next", and work on that, then follow the list down, making sure I'm keeping everything up do date.

Last semester, I used google documents and managed to make out a spreadsheet ordered by date, which actually worked pretty well. I was able to grab everything from most classes at the start of the semester and the only time I had to change anything(aside from checking off when something was done), was when a due date was changed. However, this year it seems that this method isn't working, because most due dates aren't being posted, and the information isn't being presented. This means last semesters method has to be scraped completely.

I was just filling out a survey that the school sent out about social media verses black board, and it got me to thinking. The way places like Facebook and Twitter work, we're presented with the most recent information at the top, and it goes down by date(well, mostly like this, Facebook likes to mess with the system). Another thing that uses this type of format is RSS feeds, much like we have here. So what if all of our teachers could post on a central location(just like here!), tagged with the course code (OOP344C for example), which the students could then view the RSS feed matching only their tags. Meaning that the students only see information for just their classes.

The thing about this that really got me thinking though, first of all is that there's no way the teachers are going to want to blog constantly about their classes. However, we could use a system where they just plug in all the due dates into a program, and then the system would just make the posts for them.

An example would be if something was due, the date it's posted, the system would update the students RSS feed telling them what's due and when. Then perhaps a few days before it's due(if it's an assignment), the RSS feed would be updated with a reminder of the due date, then the night before it would update a final time saying "Hey, this is due tomorrow, get to it."

The best part about this would mean no more trying to jump around between all of the classes websites and trying to navigate through blackboard. All of information would be presented in one space, and with desktop managers these days, all of the information could be sitting right on the desktop for students to easily access.

Even better though, would be that if it uses a program to send the information to the website, it means that we could use another program with a nice GUI to do exactly what I was doing with Google Spreadsheets, having the program give us a list of everything due for all (our) classes in order by date.

I'll likely be posting in the near future with some kind of design in mind, or to elaborate more on how said theoretical program would work so that it's not as vague.

Thoughts?

First Blog

Hello, this is my new blog. I've never really been one for using blogs so hopefully I'll remember to update this from time to time. Anyways, I'm a CPA student in my 3rd semester and this was part of the OOP344 class. I came up with this witty title all by myself, and I am already out of things to write on here.