Contributed by:
Anna Faktorovich
Ph.D. Candidate at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Indiana, PA, USA

A new Blackboard tool lets campuses connect the company’s course-management system to Google’s free e-mail and document-sharing services.

The connecting tool, which was developed by Northwestern University, is now available to other campuses as a “Building Block” plug-in for Blackboard. It allows students to access Google Apps within the Blackboard platform, meaning they don’t have to sign into the two platforms separately….

source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Google argues that its new Google Wave system could replace e-mail by blending instant messaging, wikis, and image and document sharing into one seamless communication interface. But some college professors and administrators are more excited about Wave’s potential to be a course-management-system killer.

“Just from the initial look I think it will have all the features (and then some) for an all-in-one software platform for the classroom and beyond,” wrote Steve Bragaw, a professor of American politics at Sweet Briar College, on his blog last week.

Mr. Bragaw admits he hasn’t used Google Wave himself — so far the company has only granted about 100,000 beta testers access to the system. Each of those users is allowed to invite about eight friends (who can each invite eight more), so the party is slowly growing louder while many are left outside waiting behind a virtual velvet rope. But Google has posted an hour-long video demonstration of the system that drew quite a buzz when it was unveiled in May. That has sparked speculation of how Wave might be used……