Holding Back on BackBoard

I have learned that Web 2.0 is all about interactivity. It's great that people can create, publish, and receive feedback on their work using many of the tools and services available for free on the Internet. However, I think some Web sites promote interactivity not for much of a practical purpose, but just for the sake of being interactive.

Last week we were asked to post our latest lesson plan on BackBoard for peer review. After completing this exercise, I am left wondering if BackBoard really serves an important purpose, or if this is simply a company jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon without offering much of a unique service.

First, we had to make the lesson plan into a URL, so I put mine on my Web site in order to do this. Then, we had to put the link to this URL on BackBoard and invite our peers to review it and provide feedback. When I posted mine, I posted the link to the file. I am not sure if this was the point of the exercise or not. If so, then my question is, why do I need BackBoard? Since I had to have a URL of my lesson plan in order to post it on BackBoard and then invite specific people via their e-mail addresses (which I had to manually look up in my address book) to view it, why couldn't I have just e-mailed those people from my regular e-mail and asked them to go to my Web site, where my lesson plan already was, and view/comment on it? I may be missing the point, but right now it seems like BackBoard is kind of an unnecessary middle man.

I think the idea of sharing documents and leaving feedback is a great, but not novel one. There are so many forums in which to engage in this type of collaborative activity, I was left wondering what BackBoard adds to this experience that other tools/services don't. Of course, all of this could be due to my Web naivete, including me missing an important function of BackBoard or using it incorrectly, but what I have described to you here has been my experience with BackBoard thus far. Perhaps someone will enlighten me and then I will be a little more knowledgeable about this Web 2.0 tool.