Bboogle (Technical)

Latest revision as of 11:30, 25 April 2011

Developed by Northwestern University, Bboogle is an add-on module for CMS (Northwestern Blackboard). It allows integration of Google apps (calendar, blogs, docs etc) for educational purposes. This mash-up can natively bring features of Google apps to a more traditional Blackboard (BB) environment (usually where you see ‘Folders’ in BB you will also see Google Sites, Docs and Calendar).

Imagine professor coming up with his/her own custom course site using Google site and have students to interact with it for their course assignments etc. In this way students can interact more intuitively in terms of submitting their HW’s rather than digging through traditional folder-based BB format.

[edit] How it works

• Only a current BB user (faculty) can use Bboogle services.
• One time Bboogle account activation is needed. Which can be done by logging in to the BB and accessing any of the Google Apps (Sites, Doc, Calendar etc.) through BB course site.
• Note: BB native documents are not integrated with Google Docs and vice versa. However, links can always be shared across both platforms.
• Sharing: A group email address for class is generated when Bboogle account has been activated. E.g for a BB course GOVT_3241, corresponding Google Apps sharing email would be GOVT_3241@university.edu. You need to only provide this group email address to share Google Apps content with students (similar to how you share Google docs by providing email addresses).
• As long as the content remains in Google Apps, it can be shared across multiple courses (I am guessing something that BB was lacking).
• At the end of the semester all of the content remains within the your course specific Google Apps. However sharing permissions can be revoked.

[edit] Advance details

• Version control is provided, similar to Google docs. In this way, depending on the sharing permissions, students can view previous versions of the same document, and faculty can always revert back to an older version.
• Advanced Google sites templates can be homebrewed besides the one provided by Google. This can be achieved by using Google Sites API.

[edit] Testing

Northwestern has made this project available open source and it can be downloaded from the project website. UT ITS can integrate it with local BB (maybe dummy courses) and test its functionality. Hands on experience would tell us more if this is the right mash-up of Google Apps we needed. Note: further functionality can also be build on top of it and maybe committed back to the open source community.

In order to successfully implement Bboogle and handle any problems, technical staff needs to be comfortable dealing with Java web applications.

[edit] High Level Installation steps (as stated in the text file provided with .zip package)

Note: Bboogle's has been tested in Blackboard version 8 and 9.1 and it requires Java 1.5+ to compile and java based Tomcat 5.5.0+ server (or equivalent).
Note: Google Apps domain MUST be a Google Apps For Education domain OR a Google Apps Premier domain.

1. Set up a separate test domain.
2. Remember both are separate platforms needing some sort of single sign-on solution (SSO). As of now, two-pass log in is required in order to access Google apps—a BB sign on and a Google Apps sign on. This can be taken care of by using a proper SSO solution. Many proprietary and open-source SSO solutions are available. Let’s stick with Google SSO and Open ID.
   1. Google SSO:
      1. If you're going to use Google SSO, then you have two choices: use the SSO that comes with Bboogle distribution or design one of your own. In either of the cases, you have to register your SSO solution with Google Apps through the Google Apps admin control panel (?).
   2. OpenID or other third party SSO:
      1. It would require a programmatic solution to tell Bboogle about your Blackboard user id to Google user id correspondence.
3. Install the Google Integration Service and configure it.
4. Customize the user mapping between Blackboard user ids and Google user ids. This can be done in any of the following ways:
   1. A text based configuration file required by Google Integration Service ('gint') web application.
   2. Use a configuration tool to do this task incrementally (one individual at a time).
   3. A programmatic solution, by providing an implementation for the JAVA interface.
5. The above mentioned step of mapping is important just because Bboogle will not get confused with BB specific user ids and Google specific user ids.
6. Install the Bboogle building block, and configure it. Just like any other Blackboard plugin.
7. Ensure that the code is talking between the Bboogle building block and the Google Integration Service. Things like creation of a specific firewall might be required (folks at UT ITS administering BB and the admin for the specific department need to ensure this).
8. Bboogle is now ready to be tested.

Bboogle doesn’t entirely come pre-cooked out of the box. In order to successfully install it, some level of technical curve is involved in terms of programming, configurations and adaptation to the native environment.

In a nutshell, Bboogle is leveraging BB framework and log in credentials to provide spiffy Google content management tools (Apps) instead of native BB tools. Quite an exciting stuff.