Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

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Website will fall victim to laziness

A new website called theClassConnection.com claims it is the end-all-be-all landmark for student study resources at the University of Wisconsin. Registration takes 30 seconds, and after that students are provided with a bountiful harvest of free notes, flash cards and a bevy of other inter-student info sharing. It?s like Facebook for the nerd ? or slacker ? at heart. That is, if someone else out there is willing to share.

The site encourages notes, flash cards and other study resources to be posted for public use. It has picked up quite a few members since its inception in September 2007, even hosting a party at the Nitty Gritty last week and expanding its horizons beyond UW to other universities and even high schools.

The essential premise behind the Class Connection is to provide everything you would need for all your classes at your fingertips in a form similar to popular social networking sites. There is even a mini-profile for users, complete with picture options and a friend adder so you can add people in your classes and then awkwardly not know if you should say ?hi? when you see them in lecture.

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But many aspects of college ? like going to class, meeting people face-to-face in that class and asking TAs or professors directly for help, instead of searching on a website for answers ? are important life skills. They are part of a definitive college experience, a chance to unglue your ass from the mold it has undoubtedly made on the computer chair and disengage from the hours of class reading, feverish e-mail-checking and social networking that already have an irreplaceable stake in the Oregon Trail that is college life. And if you?re like me and hate working out, walking to class might be your only viable source of exercise for most of the school year.

If the Class Connection sounds too good to be true, well, for the most part, it is ? at least for now. I registered for the site, filled in all my classes and alas, no free notes as of yet from any of my classmates. A fair number of UW students are on the site, but chances are slim that any given class will have an extensive network of dedicated students working to make your life easier. Genius.

But oftentimes with genius comes impracticality. For instance, consider the free rider problem. This says that if one person is paying the price for a communal good, no one else wants to do their share of the work if they are already getting it for free. For anyone who has successfully connected their laptop to an unlocked wireless Internet source outside of their own network: Congratulations, you are a free rider. Because it is human nature to love the prospect of getting stuff without doing anything for it, the Class Connection concept will most likely prove to be a fleeting one.

This is particularly true of the nameless, faceless Internet, in which the difference between two blocks and 2000 miles is negligible. No one holds any obligation to do anything for anyone else. Thus, all you can do is sit back and hope someone else posts notes. If no one does, the only way to get notes is by going to class.

But because at this point you are irrationally angered by all your lazy classmates, you will not post your notes, and the whole operation will be banished to the e-graveyard. No one will notice though, because everyone else will think just like you did and go to class, cursing your name all the while because you were the lazy one.

TheClassConnection.com is embarking on its journey to join a laundry list of other online resources that are ultimately doomed to fail. When you consider the fact that you can buy groceries, cigarettes and condoms online for doorstep delivery, pretty soon we will all be too lazy to do anything except exercise our mouse-clicking muscles.

If we assume others will do the work for us, and thus we don?t do the work ourselves, we will all fail out of school and die of starvation. And sadly, no one will get laid. Maybe that?s a bit of an exaggeration, but the moral of the story is: Go to class.

Ruth Windberg ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in history and economics.

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