Education
UPDATE: Blackboard Hearts Facebook
For the first time in a really long time, I felt a twinge of excitement that was associated with Blackboard. I was browsing the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog and just read a post that said Blackboard has released a Facebook application.
I think this is the first time in my college career that I have seen Blackboard move in the direction that the rest of the online world is moving. I’m excited, but still only a tiny bit excited. Here’s why:
According to the post at Wired Campus:
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.
Boo. Hiss. Scratch. If you’re going to extend your services and become more “open,” why not take it all the way? C’mon Karen - push it to the limit. We should be able to completely manage our classroom experience from Facebook. I think “privacy and security reasons” is a lame excuse to give. I’m not a programmer by any means, but I read a lot of news on the Internets. So far, I haven’t seen any stories about a breach in account security for Facebook. If there are any readers out there that can give reasons for this concern, please share below in the comments.
Okay - enough ranting. I’m happy to see the progress. I hope it turns into more in the coming semesters. If you’re interested, see the official press release from Blackboard about the Facebook app. Or check out blackboardsync.com to learn more.
I’ve added the application to my Facebook account. Now I’m trying to figure out why it’s not recognizing my ASU Blackboard URL…
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that ASU is upgrading to Blackboard 8 tomorrow:
If you’re an ASU student or faculty member, check out the Blackboard Wiki. There’s one for both of you:
(I think you have to log in with your ASURite username and password.)
UPDATE: After publishing this post, I sent a link around to a few people. I sent it to Matthew Maurer and Amy Storey from Blackboard, Inc., as well as Ruvi Wijesuriya, an ASU faculty member that has had experience with our implementation of Blackboard’s services. I haven’t heard anything back from Blackboard, Inc. yet, but this is what Ruvi had to say:
The new FB app for Bb looks pretty cool but it is still too buggy to implement at ASU. We have been following the experiences of other universities since the pre-release and official release of the building block and many of the institutions that run load balanced systems (like we do) have experienced problems with it. Apart from it being unstable and having connectivity issues, one bug that is a major concern is that unavailable courses (ones where the instructor has not yet made the course available to students) are showing up in the FB module and giving students access to unavailable content (for example the answer key to a quiz that has yet to be given). So I don’t see the FB add-on going in until the major bugs have been fixed and it is stable.
That was disappointing to hear, but not surprising. Given Blackboard’s lackluster past I could have predicted spotty performance on this new adventure. Let’s hope they clean it up so that students can start using it!
(Image was taken from blackboardsync.com. Hope they don’t mind.)
Discussion
3 comments for “UPDATE: Blackboard Hearts Facebook”
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That’s really interesting, U Texas is upgrading to BB 8 next week, so I will have to give it a shot at that point. I am really intrigued by the possibilities that this sort of mashup could offer….
The social aspect sounds particularly cool - if implemented correctly, it could be a really big deal.
I hope this becomes something worth using. It sounds like it’s just going to be a series of notifications that will show up in our Facebook accounts rather than allowing us to actually manage our classes.
There will probably be a lot of users; I can only hope that Blackboard will embrace the Facebook community and turn this into a relavent service instead of chaining people back to their mediocre interface.
Let me know how things turn out in Texas!
[...] Blackboard Hearts Facebook Geek Stew Alan has got a story about the course management suite Blackboard creating a Facebook application that will sync up with the Blackboard installation at your school to send notifications from Blackboard to Facebook, as well as some sort of roster functionality. UT has not updated Blackboard to version 8, but that is supposed to take place next week; stay tuned for an update when I test the Facebook application then. For the first time in a really long time, I felt a twinge of excitement that was associated with Blackboard [...]