Luke Fernandez offers a cautionary tale on the dark side of technology.

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.