Following the cease-and-desist letter, officials also emailed the students at all 23 universities in the Cal State system, warning them that selling their class notes online "including on the NoteUtopia website, is subject to discipline, up through and including expulsion from the university."

Fostering (and Fearing) Student Collaboration

Stevens says that NoteUtopia has complied with the letter, adding verbiage to the site to warn Cal State students. But he's not pleased with the message that the system sent to students as he feels as though it demonized a website that offers more than just a marketplace for students' class notes. NoteUtopia is meant to function as an online community where students can share information, discuss courses and rate professors - a supplement to, not a replacement for, offline education.

Cal State students could conceivably still share their notes - bypassing the typical $1 or so charge for a set of course-notes. And education code aside, sharing is something that is happening - whether it's being actively encouraged or not - as more students are opting to collaborate and learn together online.

It's worth noting, says Stevens, that sororities and fraternities have long had systems for sharing course materials among members. NoteUtopia merely "levels the playing field," using the Internet to allow anyone to have access to this information.

Who Owns Students' Notes?

"In school," says Stevens, "we're taught that if we put things in our own words, it isn't plagiarism. So it doesn't seem like the government should be able to tell us what to do with our own handwritten notes."

Indeed, the provision of the state education code does some raise questions about intellectual property and the ownership of ideas and course content. If the students don't own their class-notes - or at least, cannot sell them commercially - who does? The professor? The university? The state?

Stevens says he's trying to enlist the help of the EFF and the ACLU to make the case for students' rights here. Regardless, even as the California State School system decrees one thing, it seems clear that more students are interested in collaborating online - whether in a free and open forum or via a marketplace like NoteUtopia.

While such reminiscences undoubtedly wrench a wistful sigh from the breast of those who lived and worked in those heady days (like, before 2002), educating young would-be journalists about how early adopters and the tech-minded are consuming and helping distribute news is a necessary step to ensure the evolution rather than the extinction of American news services. Northwestern University has taken productive steps in that direction this spring and is set to present five interesting, student-created news apps this week.

The students have focused on easing creation and consumption of news while reducing costs of news production and enabling journalistic standards of research and factuality.

The body of work from this experiment includes sports story generator (Machine Generated Sports Stories, or MGSS) that writes sports coverage all by itself from box scores and play-by-play; a Microsoft Word plug-in (Easy Writer) that allows journos to research and fact-check stories as they write them without having to use a separate search engine; an iPhone app (News Feed) that provides the daily news in five- 10- and 20-minute chunks for news-hungry readers with limited time to read; and two Twitter apps.

Twitter News Service sends pertinent news links to users based on their posts. Either the tool will run in the background of Twitter or from a designated Twitter account that users choose to follow (or un-follow) as they desire.

Tweedia will combine news stories with relevant personal opinion and information on a given topic. By integrating Tweedia into a news site, readers get instant access to relevant Twitter posts. News outlets can place a Tweedia link at the end of stories that will either open a widget on the page or redirect readers to the Tweedia site.

Last year, Medill students built News Mixer, a site that mashed up local news with Facebook, allowing users to comment as they read even though many old-school news organizations still don't allow for comments.

Now all Northwestern needs to do is throw in the business school kids and a couple hundred thousand dollars; Startup Semester, anyone?