Last year I raved about the potential of a possible Blackboard application. If you don’t already know, Blackboard is the educational tool that is ubiquitous across college institutions within the United States. The company sells a platform which helps educational institutions build robust systems for teaching. Teachers and students share documents and can have course discussions within course-specific forums. Professors can also post grades for assignments and courses. I previously suggested that integration with Facebook would be ideal because it’s where students are spending a ton of their time.

October marked the launch of Coursefeed, which provided integration with Blackboard and a direct interface within Facebook. The application has since added over 13,000 users. 6 months later, Blackboard has launched their own application which is nowhere near as robust as the Coursefeed application. The purpose of the application is to notify students of changes within Blackboard via Facebook.

Have a new assignment posted to one of your courses? Now you can read about it within Facebook. You’ll receive a notification with a link to the corresponding page within Blackboard. You can also navigate through all the top level information pertaining to each course. This includes links to the profiles of other course mates. The application appears to be well built aside from a Java error that I received when entering false information into the fields.

The application also highlights Blackboard’s desire to keep the majority of the content within their platform. This is most likely for security purposes. Resistance to integration with Facebook is commonplace among other enterprise level applications due to the lack of security and exposure of data to Facebook. If you are a Blackboard user and want to get notifications of Blackboard info in Facebook, check out the Blackboard Sync application.

I’ve been having a back-and-forth with an acquaintance of mine over Facebook for a while now. Whenever I see him post pictures of his young grandchildren I send him a message warning him that his Facebook friends can see them, and that perhaps his privacy settings should be stronger.

Every time he asks me “can you see them now?” and every time I say “yep” a few times until he finally fixes it.

I also have a friend who bragged to me that she has very few contacts, and that nobody can see any of her pictures unless she adds them as friends. Well, she was right. At least, she was right about all of the pictures that hadn’t at one point been used as her profile picture (which happened to be virtually none of them). All a person would have to do to access them is message her and any response would open up her not-so-limited profile.

She certainly didn’t know that this was the case. Does she realize that applications encourage me to add her pictures to a public database, like the celebrity face matcher that I mentioned earlier today?

I’m not making any complaints about Facebook’s privacy settings. In fact, aside from the Beacon fiasco and the fact that applications can access my pictures through my friends’ profiles, I’m generally very impressed.

I’m merely suggesting that the average users may be overconfident in their sense of privacy. Is it Facebook’s responsibility to make sure we take the time to learn how to use the site’s were using properly? Also, is there really any legitimate expectation of privacy?

… and if not, and we’ve entered the public sphere by joining Facebook, will this have legal implications? People who enter the public sphere give up a ton of privacy rights.

Let me know what you think.

- Jonathan Kleiman

Back in September I suggested that someone should develop an application similar to Blackboard for Facebook. When attending the Graphing Social Patterns conference a few weeks ago, one of my readers, Jayson Ahlstrom approached me and told me that his company would soon be releasing a version of Blackboard on the Facebook platform.

Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to demo the product and it is amazing! ClassTop, an official partner of Blackboard®, has developed an application that literally takes 95% of Blackboard’s functionality and ports it into Facebook. If you have been out of school for more than a few years chances are you didn’t get to interact with Blackboard. Currently, Blackboard is a relatively ubiquitous product within universities across the country.

The new CourseFeed application provides users with a newsfeed of everything that is going on in their courses. Additionally, CourseFeed is not limited to the invite limits of the Facebook platform since CourseFeed is directly tied into the Blackboard platform and can directly email users. I think this application has serious potential and when I speak of Facebook’s golden application, this could very well be it. This application literally imports all of your Blackboard content directly into the platform.

Students already login to Blackboard daily but they don’t have a significant interaction with it. If you add it to the Facebook platform, I have a feeling things will change. The developers of CourseFeed agree. The real test now is to see if their beta tests go well. Currently, Blackboard functionality is only at a few test schools but they are preparing to opening it up to all schools in the near future. If you want to see what functionality is currently provided at your school, go check out the CourseFeed application.

CourseFeed Homepage

CourseFeed Course Home

CourseFeed Course Announcements

CourseFeed Course Content

CourseFeed Course Roster

Kristen Nicole has written an article regarding a new application that enables teachers to interact with students on Facebook. I had been waiting for something like this for a while and had even suggested that Blackboard launch their own Facebook application. Lookabee enables students and teachers to share documents, post assignments, answer questions and take quizzes and tests. Blackboard provides similar functionality but I have always wondered why Blackboard has a lack of social networking features.

Currently the application is running a pilot program for high-school and university teachers. If you are interested in being part of the pilot program you can go sign up at the Lookabee website or email James Levy at james [AT] lookabee [DOT] com. As a side note, I will be interested to see if Blackboard attempts to jump into the social networking arena anytime soon. They are already working on a social bookmarking site but it would be great if they provided more engagement among users. Integration with Facebook would definitely be a great feature.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the removal of the Courses application. Facebook suggested that developers copy their functionality in order to rapidly gain a larger user base. A few enterprising individuals decided to pursue that offer and so far only one of them has succeeded. Jake Jarvis’ application, “Courses” has filled that void and now has over 37,000 users.

I don’t think Jake’s application is the best though. I think he leveraged his other applications to guide users to this one. The other Courses application that was developed by Colin Schmidt and Jonathan Chapman is much more useful. There are individual course pages that provide a discussion board, course roster, course notes and more. For me I’ve always thought that the course notes application would be a huge success. There are a number of other applications that have failed to reach critical mass and I have a feeling that they will stay that way. So if you want to use a courses application and are in the United States, I highly recommend grabbing the best Courses application.

Slideshare, one of the leaders in presentation hosting has launched their official application. This is as powerful of an application as Scribd, the document sharing application that I previously reviewed. While Scribd has not been as wildly popular as I would have expected (close to 12,000 users so far), I don’t think the power of the application has been realized yet by students on Facebook. Additionally, given that school is not in session for most students, I have a feeling that mass adoption will occur later on. The Slideshare application builds on Scribds feature set, enabling individuals to share their powerpoint presentations. Students will now have a complete resource on Facebook for sharing their notes, quizzes, tests, and presentations. Soon enough Facebook will become one of the primary educational resources for students. Imagine having a record of all the reports you wrote back in college, or all of the presentations that you made. Facebook will be your own personal time capsule. This is also a great application for people that want to document presentations (those that are not confidential) at previous employers or at conferences. This redefines the concept of a resume. It will be interesting to see how many people take advantage of these new resources. If you would like a simple way to store your presentations on your Facebook profile, go grab the Slideshare application.

Want to gain inspiration from your profile? Want to improve your health? How about improving your finances? You can improve just about everything once you add the World of Wisdom application. The World of Wisdom application adds a simple audio player to your profile that is filled with inspirational and self-development audio tracks. As of now there are only 9 tracks and many of them seem to be introductory tracks that give you the inspiration to purchase new tracks. I’m currently listening to a track about overcoming ADHD but I’m having trouble giving the speaker my full attention as I am simultaneously blogging and chatting on IM. Oh well! If you want to listen to a few tracks of inspiration then go grab the World of Wisdom application.

I’m a big fan of the document sharing site Scribd. When I learned that Scribd launched a Facebook application in order to provide the “world’s largest library of schoolwork and other documents,” I was excited to see how this integration would work.

Sadly, I’m a little disappointed. For one, it is a little confusing that the the Scribd Facebook application is called “Facebook Docs”, and that it has been created by the user “Docs” rather than Scribd. Additionally, the application doesn’t integrate with preexisting Scribd accounts therefore delivering a more streamlined user experience. I’ve posted a book I co-authored called “The Non-Profit Marketing Plan Walkthrough + Foundational Interactive Strategies for Any Business” and was expecting that once I installed the app, Facebook Docs would recognize that document and pull it into the network. It didn’t.

It looks like the uptake on this app has been a little slow as well. There are 12,215 people using it at the time of this post. You can grab the Scribd powered Facebook Docs application here. Regardless of the app’s short comings, I’m glad to see Scribd working to provide Facebook users with some form of a document library.

Looking for a school wide repository of class notes and past quizzes, tests, and exams? Scribd’s “Docs” application provides just that. Upload your class notes, find quizzes and exams to help you study. While it isn’t currently organized by school or class, there are ways to tag your document to make it easier to find. A while back I began developing a site to help students share documents. While it was left as a work in progress I’m glad that someone has finally come through and developed it. This application meshes perfectly with college students. If you want to start uploading your notes and contribute to the Facebook document repository, or if you want to search through other people’s documents go check out the Scribd Docs application.

There are a few features that I think would help make this application significantly better:

• Ratings & reviews of documents
• Class attribution - It would be great to know what class and school each document pertains to.
• User rankings - There needs to be some sort of incentive for users to upload their notes. Conversely, perhaps users can be limited to the number of documents they can access based on their personal contribution levels.

These are just a few ideas but for now, this is a great start on creating the next generation of web based educational tools.