from proposal:
goals
- encourage self-directed and collaborative learning and professional development attitudes (and practices?) (SRL/SSRL)
- more cohesive academic experience for students
- vision of their own studies as part of wider discipline, relevance in and beyond university
- strengthen student academic orientation to new media and information literacy

metrics
- number of friends with similar interests
- number of student-faculty research collaborations
- student leadership in drawing new members to NAP and mentoring younger students using NAP functions

assessment measures
- active extra-curricular engagement in department's outreach initiatives, in collab with community organizations and undergrad courses
- student-faculty collaborative research projects
- ability to articulate how undergrad studies may develop skills that lead to particular career paths
- online eval integrated in website
-- NAP's effect on facility in using new media as vehicle for knowledge production
-- how help them learn new skills or leverage existing skills in academic environment

assessment plan
- site analytics from Drupal
- more complex analytics, ebb and flow of usage, usability
- integration with discourse analytics software
- qualitative
-- focus group among undergrads in both depts (800$ for incentives, 3 groups a' 20 people in budget)
-- semantic analysis of textual data

Deliverables
- milestone 1, Oct 30 2012
-- preliminary focus groups, site analytic data based on usage in winter semester 2012 in two depts

brainstorming: 

platforms it's natural to compare ourselves with/integrate with:
- academia (pubs written yourself)
- facebook (friending, walls, groups, sharing)
- twitter/google plus (following, sharing with circles)
- blogger (expressing yourself long form - Clare Brett's research on graduate student communities using blogs)
- mendeley (papers I've read, citations I've collected)
- the anti-calendar (what did I think about this class - stuff the professor doesn't want you to know)
- the portal (replacement for Blackboard during a course)
- intranet (information from the department, news updates, etc)
- goodreads (books I've read)
- Wikipedia/other wikis (collaborative knowledge - either meta, about the department/major, or discipline specific - best books for a certain period, research methods etc)
- student newspaper

what can individual users share
- status updates
- reflective writing (bloglike)
- books/articles they are reading (for class/not for class)
- courses they are taking (automatic?)
- personal profiles, descriptions
- tags
- class projects
-- texts
-- multimedia objects
- news articles, links

levels of sharing
- private to each student
- only members of the same course
- all UofT students/profs on the platform (distinguish students/profs?)
- the whole world

axis of communication
- student to student
-- students find each other through tags, joint courses etc
-- "friend" or "follow"
-- social functionality: send messages, write on each other's walls, shared activity streams
- dynamic interest groups, created by students on any topics
- class-based groups
- faculty-based groups

means of communication
- internal messaging
- writing on a public wall
- activity streams
- embedded personal blog
- embedded wikis
- asynchronous discussion forums
- commenting on artefacts (texts, videos etc)
-- simple comments below embedded artefact, or something more sophisticated like paragraph-based comments on text, overlays on YouTube videos etc
- integration with e-mail (notifications / two-ways)

automatically harvested/aggregated information
- aggregating students' blogs, twitter feeds, Mendeley activity
- having students upload their essays and extracting keywords, using latent-semantic analysis to match with other students etc
- professors' publications from Academia, T-Space

issues to consider
- participation of professors/TAs
-- on the one hand, many undergrads want more access to their professors etc
-- on the other hand, it can stifle dialogue, change communication from honest questions to "posturing", make students feel like they have to participate to get good marks (a chore) etc
-- (and we don't know if profs would actually take time to be active in the system in the first place)
- openness and privacy of information
-- there might be good reasons for all levels of privacy, at the same time it should not be complicated or impose a cognitive load when posting something, and it should also be perceived as reliable and trustworthy (as opposed to Facebook)
- longevity of forum - students might be reluctant in investing a lot in a forum that might not last (given many other attempts at student websites etc)
- what will drive participation
- what is minimum valuable product, especially for use in a few classes this fall?