If you've been to college sometime in the past decade, you might have run up against Blackboard. It's an online assignment system that students generally dread logging into, because it usually means new work or more brown-nosing questions from that showoff in your class. That's not Blackboard's fault, though. To show they want to make things easier on their user base, the students, Blackboard is now on Facebook with an app called Blackboard Sync.

A quick Google search shows that some colleges have been hacking together their own mashups of Blackboard and Facebook, which suggests to us that there's already a demand for this product. Granted, the move could have come sooner: now that Facebook is increasingly used by middle-aged PR officers who want to network -- heard of LinkedIn, guys? -- a lot of users are going to pass this by. For the college kids who still log into Facebook every day and use it as a primary mode of communication with friends, this is great. While you're making plans to go out drinking at the nearest fraternity, take a quick look at the Blackboard app to make sure you won't wake up with a last-minute assignment to finish.

The business of Facebook application development has been dying off because nobody wants to lace their profile with annoying pirates, ninjas, mummies, or whatever the latest trend is. Applications that actually have value to Facebook's natural demographic are scarce, so we hope Blackboard will turn out to be useful for students and set an example of what Facebook apps could be doing.

Blackboard Inc., "leading provider of enterprise technology to the education community," has given their support to open-source and homegrown course management software that might infringe on a patent they received last year.
In their press release the company vows to "never assert its issued or pending course management software patents against open source software or home-grown course management systems. The Blackboard Pledge is legally binding, irrevocable and worldwide in scope, giving open source software makers comfort in knowing Blackboard isn't going to sue you. (Read the full statement here.)

Blackboard creates the software used for e-learning in a good deal of our U.S. high schools as well as colleges and universities. Last year they received a patent on their technology that was met with a great deal of backlash from the education community who felt that the patent was "an attempt to own the very idea of online learning" and felt they might be sued by the company if they created their own software to be used for coursework.

Blackboards pledge gives those professors and schools the opportunity to create their own software without the fear of being pursued by the company, however Blackboard has vowed to continue to go after their major competitor. Even with their statement of support many feel Blackboard should never have been awarded a patent on the technology in the first place.

[via TechNewsWorld]