Bb Sync
Situation for students –
A vast majority of students have Facebook accounts. It is one of the most used apps among college students. Unfortunately academic life is not well represented in Facebook; students see it as a social site, not an education site.
Our goal should be to connect with students in ways and places that are meaningful to them. From the university side the means of that connection has to be secure.
Bb’s solution is Bb Sync
It is available for Bb Learning System 7 and up. Enterprise people are encouraged to use the building block. This will all even out in NG (the new system).
It is offered at no cost.
When student installs the Bb Facebook app it will look for the client whether it’s installed or not.
Demo:
From the regular Facebook interface one can enter Sync, which has a series of tabs across the horizontal axis. The tabs:
What’s new – just what it sounds like
Announcements – ditto above. Note that both of this tab and the one above are actually synced to the content (except multimedia clips, which are linked). One note: the content is synced every hour. One user in the audience suggests that students in his school think the time is too long. Of course students would like to see syncing in real time, but the presenter suggested that they had to balance the needs of the student for immediacy with the capability of the system to scan and load all that data.
Forums – just shows any changes in the last week, but clicking on the changes will bring you back to the Bb case
Materials – same as Forums
Grades – grades are not being transmitted – changes are noted, as with Forums and Materials.
Course Maps - Full hierarchical map (like the one on Bb itself). One can see the entire hierarchy of content and click on any of the content to be shunted back to Bb.
Rosters – Each Bb course has a roster. That information is pulled into Bb synch. Anyone in the course who has installed the Facebook app appears in the roster an can invite anyone. It honors both the privacy settings on Bb and those on Facebook. I guess this would be the save and secure side of things. It looks like all the roster is listed, but some users can choose to include invites, while others can opt out.
The final tab is Scholar, which is the social bookmarks feature.
If a user is at multiple Bb institutions (like many of our adjuncts) users can employ the Facebook app across campuses. Assuming that each campus uses Bb Learning System and Bb Sync.
A student can invite other Facebook users to install the Sync app, but it doesn’t enter the other user into the class. It’s just a means of propagating the Sync app across users.
What’s coming up?
-NG brings all versions together.
-The same process (see the chart above) will allow users to Sync other devices. He does not suggest which other tools are in the pipeline, but suggests that the coming Keynote will make some suggestions along that line.
n.b. – See keynote, but the other planned syncs include iPhone, myYahoo!, and iGoogle