Scholar.com is the first "property" to launch within the Beyond Initiative, which, as noted in Blackboard literature, "is committed to the development of a series of web properties that connect the institutions, faculty and students who use Blackboard worldwide, across education segments and disciplines, leveraging the wisdom of the community for teaching and learning."

How It Works

Social bookmarking is simply a way to electronically save and share a collection of resources. To paraphrase a definition of social bookmarking from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, it is the practice of saving bookmarks to a website and tagging them with keywords. In this case, the website is built into the Blackboard learning management system, and users create accounts where they are able to store, tag and share their bookmarks. In a course scenario, faculty could have administrative control over the display and sharing features in the course. For instance, faculty can allow students to contribute to a shared collection of course bookmarks or set up custom streams to pull anything tagged with search parameters of their choice (e.g. the most recent bookmarks tagged with "DNA" and discipline tagged with "Nursing" and saved by instructors).

Product Development Partners

In addition to talking with Gage, we spoke with two of the early adopters of Scholar.com, both from Grand Rapids Community College (GRCC): Eric J. Kunnen, coordinator of instructional technologies, and Garry Brand, faculty development coordinator and associate professor, Business Law. Kunnen and Brand were also active participants of a product development partners team that was comprised of about 15 Blackboard-client institutions and a team of Blackboard engineers that jointly brought this social bookmarking system to fruition.

People Everywhere Just Want to Share

Gage explained that the product development team "gave us feedback all along the way," during a six-month process that began last year. Additionally, prior to putting together the product development team, Blackboard conducted focus group sessions with some of their other clients to determine whether or not social bookmarking was actually the appropriate place to begin the Beyond Initiative. "It turned out to be a great place to start because people want to share resources," said Gage. "People typically share resources offline, or by sending links and e-mails to their colleagues or to people within their study groups. We found that a social bookmarking system would be a great place to start in terms of building knowledge-sharing environments for students and faculty."

Social Bookmarking Not So Popular, Yet

One of the interesting things that Kunnen found, through a survey he conducted at GRCC during the early development phase of Scholar.com, was that most students are not in the least bit versed in using social bookmarking tools. One thousand students were asked about what social bookmarking tool they use, if any. More than 890 students said none, 26 said they used del.icio.us, and the remaining said they used either FURL or SPURL. Kunnen said that another development partner from an institution in the United Kingdom conducted a similar survey and came up with similar results.

Brand, who has used Scholar.com in a Business Law class comprised of 30 students, explained that the vast majority in this particular class had not used a social bookmarking tool before. "They really did not know what social bookmarking meant until they got to use it in a group activity," he said. "Even those students who have used these kinds of tools have never used them in an academic setting. So, this is very new for most students, and they are just starting to see the power of using these tools."

Learning Through Sharing

For example, Brand explained how the Business Law students used Scholar.com to share their research about online credit reporting services by finding and tagging both phony and trustworthy websites that offer such services. In addition to this shared-learning experience, students exchanged law-related resources with other students from Georgetown University, where a stream of resources tagged under "law" was made available to the worldwide Blackboard community.

"This is just one example of the potential power there is around social networking and Web 2.0 technologies like social bookmarking," added Kunnen. "I think we are at the cusp of this, and it is not just an individual application. It is an opportunity to allow you to use it not only for your own work, and for classes, but also for other projects at your institution."

Saving Faculty Time

"There are a lot of social bookmarking sites out there," Kunnen continued. "One of the reasons why I think there is some power in the Scholar application is because it can be integrated with your course environment and the Blackboard system. So, you can be out on the web searching for something and then all of a sudden you come up with a nice resource that would be good for your class, and you just tag it right there, and it is dynamically updated within your course. It does not require any extra action. You just tag the resource and it is there for your students."

Other Potential Uses

Brand, for instance, has also incorporated Scholar.com into some professional development efforts related to GRCC’s Academic Foundation Program, which is a set of classes that prepare students for college level work. "We quickly established an AFP team tag to share resources," Brand wrote in his personal blog. "We can now share resources with developmental education faculty at other institutions."

Additionally, Brand is starting to bring Scholar.com into GRCC’s reaccreditation process, whereby resources related to GRCC’s participation in the Higher Learning Commission’s Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQIP) can be found, categorized, tagged and shared more easily within a single web-based environment. "I see a real need for knowledge management here on campus; institutions have a need to gather resources that everyone can look at in one spot," said Brand. "That is why I am exploring this, because I feel we can use Scholar as a tool to help populate a portal (or some other kind of website) where we can track and see what resources are available."

Overall

The whole idea of Scholar.com is to allow users to obtain information that goes beyond traditional web searching, said Gage. "We have gotten a really good response so far from clients who have seen it. There is a lot of excitement and a feeling that this is an interesting, newer kid of tool from Blackboard. They are enthusiastic about the way it has been integrated with their core platform on campus for teaching and learning."

References:

(See Products & Services Overview document, "Charting the Future: Blackboard Beyond and the Development of a Next Generation Platform," pp. 4-7.)