Simeon McMillan | Making class a social affair

"Imagine a world where you could manage your entire life from Facebook - it's not that far off!"

While you were home recuperating from the intellectual hazing that was Finals Week, an academic juggernaut other than Penn was "Making History".

Blackboard, a premier course management website, announced the release of the Blackboard Sync - its first ever Facebook application.

This marriage of social networking and online learning has the potential to be a crucial step in revolutionizing the classroom experience. Penn should get with the program and seriously consider integrating its online curriculum with this application.

"This is specifically to take advantage of the fact that college students spend a tremendous amount of time on Facebook," said Karen Gage, Blackboard's vice president of product strategy, in an interview for the website Inside Higher Ed.

Downloadable to individual profiles, the application give its users the ability to "find out if you have a new assignment, grade, new forum post.without having to leave Facebook," according to the application's welcome address.

Granted, most Facebook applications are mere whimsical widgets; little more than eye candy for even the most perpetual procrastinator.

Indented to add a touch of flair to users' personal profiles, they rarely provide any real functionality.

One need only see the names of some of Facebook's current third-party applications to illustrate this point. There are scholarly gems such as "Pirates vs. Ninjas", "R U CUTE!" (yes, that is the stated spelling), and Slate Magazine's very own "Hillary Clinton Deathwatch" (which, after her recent RFK gaffe, projects her chances of winning the Democratic nomination at 0.5 percent, in case you were wondering).

To take the temperature of the Penn student community on the subject of a Blackboard application, I conducted my usual slate of a dozen interviews. I decided however, to follow Blackboard's lead and communicate with students exclusively through Facebook instant messaging application - Facebook Chat.

Spoken language is so last century.

"The concept is incredible," wrote nursing sophomore and self-proclaimed "Facebook addict" Lindsey Goldhagen.

"This way I can know who is in my classes, check my assignments.all without leaving my favorite website."

For any website with as much self-incriminating information as Facebook, privacy is always paramount to students. It's bad enough the site currently publicizes romantic breakups across campus as if they were prime-time news events.

I highly doubt anyone would similarly want several hundred of his closest friends to be alerted when he happens to bomb a midterm or miss a deadline.

"I would use it if my professor couldn't see my profile," wrote

Wharton sophomore Vidya Dabir.

While MIT has moved to place all course content online, other schools may be wary of having any academic content on a networking site accessible to millions of people.

"It seems like colleges and universities could feel uncomfortable with linking something [private] to a public social network," wrote Wharton sophomore Sara Bayley. "That's not something they would want to connect to."

But since the application only alerts you when a course site is changed, and doesn't specifically list the actual changes, students shouldn't fear breaches of privacy.

Specific academic records will be kept more guarded than George Bush's not-so-secret recent visit to Senator McCain's private fundraiser.

All actual data such as grades and test scores will still need to be accessed the old fashioned way - by going to the Blackboard homepage and entering the same alpha-numeric password you likely share for your email, bank account, and everything else important in your life.

After all, Blackboard isn't the first organization to parlay students' penchant for procrastination into a business opportunity. Reputable publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Economist had previously enabled readers to post their content and receive updates via their Facebook profiles.

Seeing that two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof regularly posts original content to his Faceboook page, it's hard to deny the site's potential to become a legitimate disseminator of educational material.

Penn's library system manages Blackboard. While the IT Director, Michael Winkler, was not available to comment on the recent update, I vehemently hope the project is on his radar. The summer is the perfect time to beta test less-than-conventional ideas.

With a little patience, the dream of being able to "poke" your favorite professor may only be a click away.

Simeon McMillan is a Wharton graduate from Baldwin, N.Y. His e-mail is mcmillan@dailypennsylvanian.com.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.