Del.icio.us Brainfood - Educational tagging service

John Palfrey (director of Harvard's Berkmann Center for Internet & Society) just spoke at a session of UOC 's UNESCO e-learning chair about the practices and conditions of digital natives and what this means for education. At one point the discussion turned towards entrepreneurship as a suitable paradigm to describe the creative destruction of educational practices, and this is when the following education 2.0 idea struck me:

As i am elaborating in my thesis, education institutions are not exploiting the potentials to aggregate relevance the same way financial institutions are doing[1]. So here is one idea that identifies an opportunity to aggregate relevance of professors:

Build a tagging service like del.icio.us (or collabroate with them) that allows for filtering and synergizing relevance in respect to the source of the tag's author. By building exclusive academic tagging networks the quality of the information refferred to is to a certain degree 'guaranteed' and if the network

This idea would be one way "to share the knowledge of the university" as Julia Minguillon pointed out is the key mandate (formulated in the web 2.0 fashion) of educational institutions.

This idea might also entangle very well with the 'social search engine' e.g. wikia "the search engine that changes everything" concept, pursued by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. An entrepreneurial university could reap first mover advantages and publicity by partnering up and pioneering 'professors recommended' search results.

UPDATE: I just found an interesting service that aims pretty much at what i am thinking about: http://edtags.org/ (is a Harvard related initiative)

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[1] This is a theme i have found in Sasskia Sassen's work - she compares the exploitation of digitization by financial organisation with civil society organisations.