© P. C. Loadletter

Love logging on to Facebook, but hate checking your assignments on Blackboard? A new Facebook application can help you combine the two. Wired Campus reports:

"Blackboard has created a Facebook application for students that brings their academic information into the social-networking site. For privacy and security reasons, the Facebook application does not actually pull academic data from Blackboard onto a user's Facebook page, said Karen Gage, vice president for product strategy at Blackboard, in an interview on Tuesday. Instead, it pushes a notification to Facebook users when something is new on their course Web pages, such as when one of the user's professors has posted grades. Then the student has to log into Blackboard to see the grade itself."

On one hand, this application may be very useful for keeping students up-to-date with their online courses. But it does seem like a rather unpleasant mix of the social and academic worlds. Sometimes people want to chat with their friends without receiving a lesson update on Facebook, getting a Twitter detailing their professor's latest thoughts, or engaging in classroom projects via cell phone texting.