Blackboard meets Facebook
Images by TheTrident and AJC1, used under the Creative Commons license.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today that Blackboard Vista has released a Facebook application to alert students when something changes on a Blackboard course Web page. From The Chronicle's article:
Students eagerly spend hours on Facebook, where they socialize and communicate with friends. But they're often far less excited about logging into Blackboard, the course-management system used at hundreds of colleges, where they participate in required class discussions and check when their next test is scheduled. So Blackboard has created a Facebook application for students that brings their academic information into the social-networking site.
For privacy and security reasons, the Facebook application does not actually pull academic data from Blackboard onto a user's Facebook page, said Karen Gage, vice president for product strategy at Blackboard, in an interview on Tuesday. Instead, it pushes a notification to Facebook users when something is new on their course Web pages, such as when one of the user's professors has posted grades. Then the student has to log into Blackboard to see the grade itself.
What do you think about an application like this? A useful tool? Or would you rather not think about academics at all when you log into Facebook? And more specifically, is this something you would be interested in seeing integrated into or disconnected from CSU, Chico's Blackboard system?
Contributed by Aaron Bowen
Comments
UPDATE: Barbara Fister expresses some doubt about this widget. She says,
It’s an interesting take on that vaguely unsettled response we sometimes get from students when we [or someone like Blackboard] try to be too cool, try too hard to seem fun and playful, when we make familiar toys unpalatably “educational.” Setting up an outpost in an attractive playspace with an ulterior motive is just . . . creepy.
We will see how this thing continues to play out...
Posted by: Aaron Bowen | May 19, 2008 11:47 AM