We’ve seen this before.  Remember BBSync?  The hype?  And the reality failed to deliver any meaningful interaction between Blackboard and Facebook.

I just read some hype about Northwestern integrating Blackboard and Google Apps.  If you read what they mean by integrating on the Northwestern Course Management Blog, it’s the typical, non-meaningful type: “the ability to make links within CMS sites to content (Docs, Calendar, and Sites) residing on Google and to allow instructors easilyto manage permissions on Google content for an entire class.”

Why?

I often get questions if Schools on Facebook can integrate with this and that, and usually the questions center around links and notifications.  Before we set about trying to do an integration, we are always asking ourselves: Why?  And what we mean at Inigral is: Why from the users perspective?

(Most people ask for integration because they want to believe in convergence rather than divergence, and they don’t like the idea of the sunk operational costs of maintaining disconnected systems.  But divergence is reality and users are used to it, and if you really want sunk costs go ahead and spend your time hooking up disconnected systems (that aren’t built to talk to one another) in unmeaningful ways.)

Making uninteresting information appear in more places is just not a viable product strategy.  The key is to enable meaningful interaction that can create new, meaningful information.

When Blackboard announces something cool like that, I’ll believe Blackboard is doing more than just jumping the shark.