Integrate Facebook with Blackboard for Mobile Learning

Abstract

Social networking has been a popular and critical communication platform for plenty of Internet users. They use social networking web sites, in particular Facebook, for sharing their thoughts and facilitate the communications among the people they know. Besides, there are several user interfaces for accessing the Facebook system, including web browser, various mobile devices, such as smartphone (i.e., iPhone and Android devices). Due to the user friendly interface and huge population of Facebook users, Facebook is actually an ideal education platform, as it can reach huge amount of users instantly. However, as Facebook is not designed dedicated for education purposes, its user interface does not provide necessary utilities, which becomes obstacles for educators to make the best use of Facebook for education purposes. In this project, a system that integrates Facebook with Blackboard so that Facebook can be used by students for learning purposes, in particular with mobile devices is presented. The system is a web-based system known as EduFace for facilitating the maintenance of Facebook resources for education purposes and is targeted to integrate Facebook with Blackboard. The system is done development at CityU and can be released now.