The Chronicle of Higher Education points to LionShare - a peer-to-peer file-sharing system will allow teachers/researchers to search their own and one another's digital collections of documents, images, and other material (residing on each other's computers).
The Internet itself was the first step towards that, but required each individual to put up his/her resources online and not many folks put up stuff they had. But now with storage being pushed back one level to each indivdual's own computer, all the interesting stuff residing on one's desktop can becomes available now to others.
Along with the benefits, the article also discusses the fears of the teaching community if they chose to share their files.
