As we continue to explore and experiment with potential applications for the iPhone in higher education, we become increasingly excited about the manner in which the iPhone might function as an access tool and facilitation device for virtual learning communities that effectively aggregate our students, ourselves and our course content.

With this in mind, we recently stumbled across NoteSake, a free online community that enables students to take, organize, share class notes and collaborate in groups. With NoteSake a student can take notes during class and share them with a friend, or groups can work together on the same note, all through laptops (or iPhones?). NoteSake also allows students to organize notes by title, date, course and custom tag–making it easy to cross-reference notes.

It is not difficult to imagine how the iPhone might be employed with programs like NoteSake to create productive, virtual learning communities.