Near-Time, Inc: Academic

Saw this on the Educational Weblogs Blog:

Near-Time, Inc: Academic (I don't think they will mind the long quote, since it will only help with their marketing):

"Leveraging Near-Time Flow and Near-Time Current, teachers can engage their classes with unprecedented reach and ease. The Collaborative-Class is well suited for universities and colleges, high schools and middle schools. For a limited time, an entire class room can be deployed for $49.95.

Using Flow teachers can author, gather, organize, publish and share their curriculum with students, other teachers, administrators, parents and school boards. Flow users can author and receive weblogs and RSS feeds. Flow's standards based architecture and embedded browser mean curriculum is web driven and always up to date. Powerful, knowledge management resources automatically organize content so that that class work is current and relevant. Flow's version management system keeps up with changes to Flow content and even keeps track of application files and web pages.

Once the material is complete Flow users can share their content, including authored pages, application files and webpages to other Flow and Current users. Flow's version tracking is group enabled, with each edit linked to the contributor. Flow's commenting capabilities enable rich annotation to any content, (great for reviewing student work). Using Flow, teachers can collaborate with each other on curriculum creation throughout the world. Additionally, third party content creators can author and distribute their content throughout the school year.

Students using Current can work on assignments shared to them via Flow. Current's access to Internet content make it ideal for research. Access to information feeds and knowledge management tools mean students stay on top of the latest topical information. Students can take advantage of Current's diverse publishing and export options to submit their work. Students can easily publish Current content to any web server or iDisk- accessible to the teacher, class, parents, school boards or the world."

Looks pretty nifty. The downside: OS X only. I don't understand why companies don't strive for cross-platform apps. Oh well, might be worth looking into anyway.