Jessica Lo is a junior at Cornell University majoring in Operations Research and Information Engineering. Upon graduation, Jessica wishes to pursue a career in the consumer goods industry. Jessica is a GradeGuru Brand Director at Cornell University and a contributing author to our blog.

At the beginning of the semester, I noticed a lot of students handing over $60 to purchase a set of TakeNote lecture notes for their popular class. I was thinking to myself, why are students paying for a note taking service when there is a much better (and free) alternative available.

The main advantage that GradeGuru has over TakeNote is that GradeGuru is absolutely free. GradeGuru provides reliable lecture notes and great study material for a wide variety of classes, and not just those that are considered popular. From economics to computer science, you are sure to find the material that you need. And if the notes are not available for your specific class, you can also look at other students notes from another college or better yet, you can be the first to upload your notes to the site.

When you share your notes on the website, you can accumulate points toward great rewards, including cash and gift cards. If you are already taking notes for your classes, why not share it with other students? Not only will other students thank you for your efforts, but you will also be rewarded by GradeGuru. Money shouldn’t be flowing from your pocket into Takenotes for their lecture notes, but you should be the one rewarded and recognized for your great notes.

GradeGuru really provides a sharing network that allows students to share their notes, study together, build their academic reputation and earn rewards. And with the price of education rising, the last thing you need is to be spending more money on lecture notes, and GradeGuru is helping students to do just that. So, make sure to hold onto your $60 and go see what GradeGuru has to offer you. Im sure youll get more out of it than youve ever thought I definitely have.

Allie Nikitas is a Junior at Miami University of Ohio majoring in Finance with a minor Marketing. Nicole is a GradeGuru Ambassador at UM and a contributing author to our blog.

As I settled into another year at Miami University I was excited to start spreading the word about GradeGuru. One thing that I didn’t know was how it would be received by Miami students. Would students be skeptical of the new notes uploading site or would they try it out? In the last couple of weeks I’ve been interacting with all sorts of students on campus, showing them all the great benefits that GradeGuru has to offer them and the verdict is in. Miami students are really excited about GradeGuru.
Joyce Lin, a Junior Accountancy major pointed out, “I already have notes from the last two years that have been sitting on my computer doing nothing. It’s great that I can upload them for other students to use and even get rewarded for it.” When I asked her if she planned on using GradeGuru to search for notes for classes in which she is currently enrolled, Joyce explained, “I’ll definitely search for notes to clarify a concept or just to get another student’s perspective on something.”
I’ve also put together a team of interested students from Miami Business Consulting, which is a student run consulting group on campus, to help promote GradeGuru. Allison Karns, a Senior Marketing major on the team has been really impressed with how easy it is to find notes for specific classes. Another aspect of the site that members of the MBC team love is the ability to rate notes because you know that when you pull up a five-star rated file that you’re looking at top notch notes.
With GradeGuru being so new to Miami University, it should make for an interesting semester to learn how students are incorporating the site into their academic routine. I can’t wait to hear what Miami students like Joyce and Allison think of the new homepage and Miami University specific page when they launch!

Jenny Niesluchwski is a Senior at Cornell University majoring in Communications and Business. Jenny is also a GradeGuru Brand Manager at Cornell University and a contributing author to our blog.

I remember when I first heard about Napster. I was in middle school at the time, and my only source of income was a weekly $5 allowance, assuming I completed all my chores on time. The idea of being able to “share” and “borrow” music with people around the world seemed way too good to be true. As it turned out, it was in a way. Napster clearly hit a few walls, but they managed to pave the way for other companies to steer around the music industry’s copyright restrictions.

All these memories of sharing my N’Sync albums came flooding back when I first stumbled upon GradeGuru. Again, I said to myself, this seems way too good to be true. So I investigated. The principles are the same: file-sharing through one common source for the benefit of all users. But what makes GradeGuru so unique is that people are willing to post their own material; they are offering their work to help other students. And not just that, but contributors receive points toward cash rewards!

How did I not see this coming? A site for sharing notes now seems like a completely logical step in the progression of education and technology. (I mean, we all share notes anyway, why not make it as easy as possible?) We college students were born into this digital age and are constantly evolving with these new technologies. We are a generation that depends on instant communication and thrives on adapting to the latest PDA’s and laptops.

So we share music (legally), and we share our notes- what’s next? Will GradeGuru soon be featuring an audio/visual upload feature, so we can feel as though we are actually in the class? As for file-sharing in general, I can only imagine what the next big thing is going to be.

Disclaimer: This post does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of GradeGuru or McGraw-Hill Higher Education. It is solely the opinion of the author.

Dr. Paul Levinson is a Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City. He was recently listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Top 10 Academic Twitterers” and is part of the GradeGuru Academic Advisory Committee.

My latest book, New New Media , was published by Penguin Academics on September 5, 2009.  As I point out on the first page, the book is about media so new that some of them – such as Twitter and YouTube – did not even exist five years ago.   I wrote the book as close to the bone of current events as possible.   The use of Twitter by protestors in Iran in June 2009, for example, is prominently included in the book’s Twitter chapter.

But I turned the book’s final revisions into the publisher in July, and the pace of important developments in the world of media has of course not slackened in the slightest.   This blog post is the first of a running series I will be posting here, there, and everywhere about these newest of new developments.

One of the most significant of such developments occurred in mid-July, when Amazon abruptly reached into the Kindles of every Kindle owner and removed George Orwell’s 1984, which Amazon discovered it did not have the legal right to sell.   Kindle owners and the online world at large were furious, especially because annotations which Kindle owners had made on their purchased copies of 1984 were removed with the book.   If Amazon had wanted to demonstrate that the Big Brother information control in 1984 was alive and kicking in our digital age, it could not have put forth a better example.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos soon apologized , calling its solution to the copyright problem “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”  Amazon offered to either refund the $30 which the Kindle edition cost, or re-deliver the copy of 1984, along with any absconded annotations.

But this series of events provides an instructive example of the difference between new media and new new media, which I discuss throughout the book.  “New” media exist on the Web, alongside of new new media.   But “new” media often operate in accordance with older, top-down principles of information control.   In the case of a newspaper online, such as The New York Times, the older approach is manifest in the selection of stories by editors.   In true new new media, stories are selected and even written by readers – that is the case in any personal blog.   In the case of iTunes and Amazon, consumers are charged for the content.  In new new media such as Twitter and YouTube, the content is free.

Amazon took a huge step into the past by not only charging for its Kindle books, but removing one of them after it had been purchased.   Its apology was certainly welcome.   But the lesson endures that there is a very big difference between older ways of doing business on the web, and the newer more liberated ways of new new media.

Disclaimer: This post does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of GradeGuru or McGraw-Hill Higher Education. It is solely the opinion of the author.

GradeGuru was just featured on Student Stuff !!

Student Stuff offers help with college applications, advice on which student activities to get involved with, managing your budget, useful study tips and other college “stuff”.  Check out studentstuff.com for more info and college resources.

Also, don’t forget to Check out our mention here: Paying Attention Actually Pays. Neato.

Thanks to all of your feedback, we’re revamping our point system on September 15.

We are increasing your ability to earn based on how many people view and rate your notes. There more popular your notes are, the more points you will get.  There will be NO limit on how much you can earn, just make sure you get good notes up there and share the link to your notes with your friends and classmate via Facebook, email, IM, etc.  

Tips for increasing your visibility:

1. Go to GradeGuru and link your GradeGuru account to your Facebook account. Then when you share notes, your friends will get an update in their feed. Click on the Facebook icon on our homepage.
   
2. Share your GradeGuru notes with your classmates. Send them your personal GradeGuru URL.
3. Share your notes via Facebook, Delicious, Twitter, etc by opening your notes on the site and using the Share tool.
4. Invite your friends to join GradeGuru

I will be presenting at the Alt-C 2009 Conference in Manchester, UK on Thursday, September 10th.

Title: Social Media and the Need for Peer-Support: student attitudes towards study and the impact of web 2.0 on student study habits

Time: 10:50 – 11:50

Location: Room 2.219

This paper will present our segmentation model for the collective “student voice” on course work and students’ beliefs about technology in their studies. I will be discussing how web 2.0 is impacting student behaviors and methods. I will conclude with the need for peer-assisted, collaborative learning tools to help students intuitively translate their social-technology skills to their education.

Our ethnographic student research included:

• Video ethnography: students “thinking aloud” about decision making and motivations
• Study journals: activities (social, work and study) and use of technology over three days
• Study environments: photographs of physical study tools and contexts
• On-campus observation: interactions in study and recreation areas
• Individual and group interviews: mapping study methods and tools
• Social media: cataloging all study-related conversations on blogs and social media

We will also share salient cross-group behaviors, e.g.:

• Anxiety/ lack of confidence due to unclear “rules for success”
• Peer support through social media for building confidence
• Anomalies in sophistication levels with technology in different contexts. E.g. basic skills with search and tagging for research, despite expert use for social purposes
• Sources/ research: “build the skeleton” using online sources (Wikipedia), “put meat on the bones” with academic sources (published)

Feel free to email me if you’re attending the conference and would like to connect emily_sawtell@mcgraw-hill.com

Already seeing some interesting tweets from today’s sessions!