I agree with you views on BB. Very c**p. I am using Backpack for Content Management – the Content Management facilty on BB seems very cumbersome, and I don’t feel confident about it. Huddle looks interesting …

Currently some undergraduates are getting confused about drop boxes and dedicated assignment submission facility on BB – some lecturers say use the Drop Box, some say use the assignment facility. This seems to be due to BB not working consistently.

Also, lecturers tend to be variable in their use of BB. That puts off undergrads I think.

And I agree, BB just looks plain clunky with its use of frames.

I have some more general problems with BB or with anything that might replace it. It’s probably more to do with my general gripes about the universities work. BB acts as a conduit for lecturers’ module habdouts, powerpoints etc, and for electronic submission of coursework, but a university social network could be *so* much more. There are facilities for thread-based discussions on BB, but I do not know of any modules where these have been used to get real discussion going on.

People use Facebook because they can create content and have a feeling that they own it in some way, that it is theirs,(it isn’t but that’s another matter), but BB is the university’s software and students don’t have that sense of ownership.