What is Social Bookmarking?
Scholar social bookmarking is an easy way for students and instructors to get more out of internet searching. By gathering web resources into a central location and adding metadata through tagging and organization schemes, users create semantic knowledge webs. For the brief overview of the basics of social bookmarking, view the video below.
If you want to read more about the potential applications of Scholar for education, you can view this recent paper on Social Bookmarking Strategies for Learning.
How Does Scholar Work?
The service features all the standard social bookmarking tools including:
- SAVE & TAG your web resources with the classifications that work for you
- IMPORT bookmarks from your browsers or other services like Digg or Delicious
- SHARE your collection with other scholars
- SEARCH existing resources by tag, discipline, and/or institution
- BROWSE resources from users who have similar research interests
- SUBSCRIBE choose search terms or specific user's and sign up to receive the most recent bookmarks via RSS
To begin using the service, all you need to create a Scholar account using a simple web interface. Only eClass (and Blackboard / WebCT) users can create Scholar accounts, so you need to access the service from within your eClass course.
How Do I Use Scholar in my Course?
Blackboard Scholar is built right into the Blackboard Learning System, for easy integration of relevant, reliable resources and dynamic streams from Scholar, directly into the course.
For Instructors:
There are two ways Blackboard instructors can integrate Scholar resources directly into the course environment:
- Scholar Course Tool - You can display customized Scholar resource collections as a new course tool. You can allow students to contribute to a course collection or set up custom streams to pull anything tagged with search parameters of your choice. (e.g. the most recent bookmarks tagged with DNA and discipline tagged with Nursing saved by instructors). Students in the course can access the Scholar Course Welcome Page by clicking the Scholar course tool and begin using the resources in their studies right away.
- Course Documents Type - You can embed one of your Scholar Bookmarks or Saved Searches directly in the course as a new type of Course Documents.
For Students:
Once the instructor has registered your course with Scholar, you can access Scholar resources that your instructor has chosen directly within your course. And now students can contribute to course collections as well! When you find appropriate resources, you can tag them for the course and dynamically add them to the course collection!
For more information about Scholar Bookmarking, contact CTL Technology Services at elearning@ualberta.ca or at 780-492-9372.