One of the laments many faculty express at the migration of course materials from the open Web to course management systems is that it is harder to find  examples of syllabii from colleagues at other institutions, since for the most part, Blackboard courses don't show up via Google. 

The ITS department at University of North Carolina has just released a nifty new tool called bFree that takes the contents of a Blackboard course and creates a free-standing website out of it. While one wonders how it handles the parts of a course that really shouldn't be on the open Web (copyrighted materials, private information for student eyes only, etc.), this seems nonetheless a welcome development. Using bFree can perhaps turn the tide of encroaching invisibility, providing access to the materials presently hidden behind the CMS firewall.

BibMe is a new web-based bibliography tool created as a software development project at Carnegie-Mellon. Unlike CiteULike and Zotero, two other powerful web-based bibliography tools that seem aimed at scholarly researchers, this tool seems geared primarily toward students. It strips down the bibliography process to simply typing in search terms. All one needs to do is type in a search term under the appropriate category, and a list of possible sources appears. Clicking on an option automatically generates a bibliography entry. Entries may also be manually entered if the source is not contained in the database. The tool lacks the social aspects of CiteULike, where one can peruse other users' libraries or browse through tags, but it does have a suggested reading feature where similar sources appear under the bibliography entries. Sadly, the bibliography can only be exported to Rich Text Format, and I didn't see an import option so that existing citations could be uploaded. It does seem like an interesting tool and probably useful for students.

An article in the July 13  Chronicle, "Bloggers Need Not Apply," by "Ivan Tribble," a pseudonymous humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest, cautions about the dangers of blogs for job seekers. "Tribble" reports about the damage that several candidates inflicted on themselves by suggesting that the search committee check out their blogs and websites.Those willing to read found the "dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag." If you want to track the follow-up to the Chronicle article, see Blogline's very cool service that shows all pointers to a given article--at last count, some 437 of them.