Scenarios for People, Connections, Profiles

Please tell us stories of how students and faculty need to find and connect to other people.

As I understand it, the social networking needs of 3.0 is largely driven by Cambridge, where students find instructors to give them instruction on a topic in a one-one-one seminar. I'd therefore especially like to hear about

how students currently find a professor to teach them.
do they use it to connect to other students?
do faculty need to use it to find other faculty?
aside from finding each other for a one-off communication, and joining groups/classes, would faculty or students want to make permanent direct connections, ala facebook or linkedin? for what purpose?

Please fill in the first two columns below

Scenario Title and Brief description	Contributed by	Comments

A professor wants to find a colleague with a particular expertise A biology professor is putting together a lecture series on bioethics and needs to find colleagues not only in biology, but also law, philosophy, and political science to give a lecture next semester.	Keli	This is not based on feedback, but I wanted to provide an example of the types of scenarios we are looking for. Seems like it might be a realistic use, but I'd prefer to get some from the community.
Build research network A post-doc researcher in physics fills in her profile page and uploads her publications. She also chooses to share her Zotero reference collections and connects to 3 researchers in her research team. The network research social graph identifies another researcher in the Engineering department who is working on similar materials and who has published with co-authors of papers from her colleagues. She browses his online profile and sends a connection request. Later they decide to set up a shared space to work on a grant application together.	John

A master at Yale is putting on a Master's Tea. He/she needs to primarily target his/her college. But he/she also wants to advertise the tea to students at other colleges | | | | |
A student decides at the beginning of their senior year that they want to write a senior thesis after-all (they hadn't really thought about it until they got back to school). The student needs to put together a group of faculty readers quickly (after all you've only got a few months to write the darn thing). But she is a bit challenged; she has been making her way through the major requirements but hasn't really spent any time visiting with faculty one-on-one. The student really wants to write a senior thesis but it turns out that the literary skills they've developed so far (in reading and writing) aren't the only thing that get the thesis off the ground. She also needs to be able establish a rapport and some collegial relations that transcend the cookie-cutter relationships established in the classroom. She will drum up the courage to visit prospective professors during their office hours....but wouldn't it be nice if the digital world could grease the wheels as well?| | | | |
A faculty member is getting fed up with the internecine battles that effect her department. The life of the mind was supposed to be fun! But all she does now is history-history-history. And while there are virtues in having an office in proximity to her colleagues it would be nice if she'd occasionally have the opportunity to have the serendipitous interdisciplinary conversations one often makes when simply running into someone from another department when walking across the quad. But it's the middle of winter and the quad is empty....maybe there's a digital quad somewhere she could log into? | | | | |