Educationally Focused Social Bookmarking

1. Blackboard Scholar
Educationally Focused Social Bookmarking

2. Outline of session
• What is Social Bookmarking?
• What is Blackboard Scholar?
• How can I use Blackboard Scholar?
Duration: 30 minutes

3. Bookmark
A thin marker, commonly made of paper or card, used to keep
one's place in a book and so be able to return to it with ease.
Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmark
Internet Bookmark
Stored Web page locations that can be retrieved. Their primary
purpose is to easily catalogue and access web pages that a user
has visited and chosen to save.
Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bookmark

4. Social Bookmarking
A method for Internet users to store, organise, search, and
manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help
of metadata (data about data).
These bookmarks are usually public, but can be saved privately,
shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside
certain networks, or another combination of public and private
domains.
Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Bookmarking

5. Internet Tagging
A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece
of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or
computer file). This kind of metadata (data about data) helps
describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or
searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the
item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a
website in which many users tag many items, this collection of
tags becomes a folksonomy.
Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)

6. First steps with Blackboard Scholar
1. Create Blackboard Scholar account
2. Add ‘Scholar It!’ Bookmarklet to your computer
3. Use Bookmarklet to pull resources into Scholar
4. Familiarisation with the Scholar environment.
• Saved bookmarks can also be accessed anytime
(independently of Blackboard) via:
http://www.scholar.com

7. Searches and Streams
• Creating Scholar searches
• Creating Scholar streams from saved searches
My Scholar and Course Scholar
• My Scholar home page
• Scholar Course home page

8. Strategies
• Identify other users (same interests, same discipline,
someone who locates interesting resources consistently) and
follow their bookmarking
• Follow all bookmarks relating to a particular discipline
• Follow all bookmarks from a particular institution
• Follow all bookmarks that have a particular tag applied
• Combine criteria: e.g. Follow all bookmarks from the
discipline “Astronomy” that have also been tagged with
“Planet”.

9. Activities/Ideas
• Ask students to locate resources on a particular topic and add
them to the Scholar Course Home page. Then run an activity
asking students to critique resources discovered by others
stating why some are more reliable/valuable than others.
Students could post a reflection on this process in a course
discussion board or blog. Alternatively this activity could be
used as a spark for discussion in a face to face session.
• Re-purpose resources that were accumulated over an
academic session by offering them as resources to new
cohorts or asking a new group of students to critique them.

10. Next Steps
• Complete your Scholar profile
• Think about the tags you may want to use for your own
bookmarks or for particular courses
• Familiarise yourself with the Scholar environment
• Register your course/courses with Scholar and notify course
participants of the unique course tag.