I've been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept - a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in. It's getting really close - it can currently suck in all kinds of feeds, auto-tagging items, and even lets students create their own groups and associate feeds with them. There are issues, to be sure, mostly with respect to honouring the original tags in the aggregated items, and with taking advantage of the social rating system added to the website, but it's so close I can taste it.
At the moment, there are almost 1200 items aggregated from feeds published by 19 users. It's only been running for a week, so that's not a bad start...
One added bonus of using Drupal for this, is that I can drop the Tagadelic module into place to generate a tag cloud representing all aggregated items' tags. Here's the tag cloud from the current prototype site:
Just seeing that aggregate cloud makes me smile. I'll have to work on things like adding a group-only tag cloud, and maybe a tag with date parameters (which could be REALLY useful to build a movie displaying the shifts in tag weights over the course of a semester or year...)
As an aside, I'm pretty sure that this is the first post that I've added to all of the main categories of my blog: General, Work, and Fun. I'm pretty sure there's something to that...