Scholar Logo                 An Instructor's Guide to Scholar:

Social Bookmarking:
"the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and "tagging" them with keywords." __ Educause Learning Initiative 2005

Scholar is a Social Bookmarking tool that has been developed specifically by Blackboard and integrated closely with Blackboard's Learning System. Scholar is a tool for managing online resources in the information age, an increasingly popular way to find, save, classify, evaluate and share Internet resources, and a way of creating an educational network of students and scholars from around the world.

Using a social bookmarking site, instructors and students can "bookmark" valuable Web resources, (anything with a URL) tagging them with keywords. In addition to websites, it is possible to bookmark articles in a library database, videos in YouTube, or anything else that has its own unique URL. Scholar bookmarks are stored in a repository on the network where others can use them. (That's the "social" part.). Students and instructors can then use each other's classifications, as well as the other information stored with resources (who saved it, how many people bookmarked it, what tags were used to annotate the bookmark, etc.) By storing bookmarks and sharing information such as  tags, disciplines, other users who have tagged, Scholar will allow users to find relevant and reliable resources.

Scholar allows you to:

Scholar was created by Blackboard for academic resource sharing,  across courses and institutions, thoughout your academic career.  You can explore Scholar at http://www.scholar.comwithout an account, but to get access to the full functionality of Scholar and to save your own resources, you first need to open an account. (Presentation on the Pedagogical Strategies with Social Bookmarking)

1. First, Create your Scholar Account.
The first time a user clicks on a link or the tab to Scholar on their Blackboard learning management system, they will be presented with a Scholar Account Creation form. Setting up an account is important:

This Scholar Account Creation form will ask the individual to select a Desired Scholar Login name and a Desired Scholar Password. Scholar Login names are for life, so they should be selected carefully. The user can not change their Scholar Login name after creation. Individuals can retrieve their Scholar Passwords providing they enter a valid email address and provide a Password Hint. Passwords and Password Hints can be changed by the user after creation. After account creation, everytime an individual clicks on a link or tab to Scholar, inside the learning management system, they will be seamlessly authenticated through to Scholar.

[Scholar bookmarks are portable.  When an individual joins another institution which also has Scholar installed, the user can click on the "Already a Scholar Member" link, enters their Scholar Login and Scholar Password to associate their Scholar account (and all their Bookmarks) with the new institution's Blackboard learning management system for access from this new institution's learning management system.

2. Next, Download and install the Scholar BOOKMARKLET in your browser – A bookmarklet is a button that can be installed in your browser in the Toolbar. Once installed, any time discover a site you want to save to Scholar, you can click on the bookmarklet and easily add that site to Scholar. (Those who already have a collection of bookmarks saved in their favorite browser, can IMPORT existing bookmarks in Scholar from a browser or other social bookmarking service.)

Install the Scholar Bookmarklet?
You can add the Scholar bookmarklet after creating your Scholar account, by connecting to Scholar.com and clicking on the "Add Bookmarklet" link on the upper right of your Scholar Home Page. A copy of these instructions is available at http://www.scholar.com/bookmarklet.dobbb

  1. Make sure your browser's toolbar is enabled.
  2. Install the bookmarklet in your toolbar using the right directions for your internet browser:

For Internet Explorer:

For Firefox :

3. SEARCH - Enter any search terms in the Search Bookmarks field and search for the keyword in the Title, Description, or Tags of bookmarks. You can also create more complex searches by entering complex queries using the Advanced search

ADVANCED SEARCH Advanced Search provides a more detailed set of parameters so you can perform more focused searches and get relevant results. Advanced Search allows you to search all of Scholar's collection by a combination of the following eight fields; the first four criteria are displayed on the form by default. Click on the "Add Criteria" button to add any of the last four criteria.

  1. Keywords: searches for any term in the Title, Description or Tags of bookmarks
  2. Tags: searches for any term in the Tags field of bookmarks
  3. Discipline Tags: You can select from the drop-down list or from the auto-complete list as you type.
  4. Course Tags: searches for any of your Course Tags. You can select from the drop-down list or from the auto-complete list as you type.
  5. Institution: searches for any bookmarks added by users who have Blackboard Learning System accounts at the selected institutions. You can select from the drop-down list or from the auto-complete list as you type.
  6. User Name: searches for any bookmarks added by users with the entered username (Must be a Scholar username, not a Blackboard username).
  7. User Role: Role is determined based on a user's enrollments in the Blackboard Learning System.
  8. User's Highest Degree: searches for any bookmarks added by user's who have achieved the selected degree. Degree is set in the user's profil

Saving a Search?

If you find a set of search parameters that returns a list of resources that is valuable to you, then saving it eliminates the need for you to re-enter the search parameters every time you want that information. You can save any search by clicking the "Save Search" button in the top right corner of your search results and enter the name for your search. By saving a search, you are saving the search parameters, not the results. Each time you access your Saved Search, the system runs the search again, thus ensuring you always have the most up-to-date results. You can always access your list of Saved Searches from the Advanced Search form or any Search Results page.

Also, your Saved Searches can be added to the My Scholar Home page and to the Scholar Course Home as Streams. With Streams, each time you access the Scholar page, you will get the most recent, up-to-date resources that are relevant to you.

4. TAGs - save your bookmarks and searches to your Scholar collection to use in research or a course at anytime. You can name, classify image1("tag") and describe the resources anyway that works for you, including tagging by your courses.

To save a Scholar bookmark, using the bookmarklet, all you have to do is to click on the Scholar It! Icon in your toolbar (pointed to with a red arrow in the preceding picture).  The Scholar Bookmark form opens with some information already filled in.  You can add a Description, a number of Tags to make it easy for you or others to find it.

Tag Clouds are visual representations of tags, Course Tags, and Discipline Tags used to classify a set of bookmarks. Tag Clouds are sorted alphabetically, but the size of the individual tags in the tag cloud indicates the frequency with which the tag was used -- the more frequent the tag, the larger the size of that tag in the Tag Cloud. You can click on a tag in the Tag Cloud to filter the set of bookmarks by that tag.

You'll see four kinds of Tag Clouds in Scholar:

image2

Description: Provide notes about or a description of the web page you want to bookmark.

Tags: single words or short phrases that are a meaningful way to classify and retrieve a bookmark. Enter tags separated by spaces, and if you want to use a phrase, put it in quotation marks. For example, you might tag a web page about King Arthur with England "King Arthur" literature.

As different people describe things with the same tag, they're automatically building a shared collection. So if I add a resource and tag it with "Shakespeare" and someone else comes along and finds a different resource that they tag with "Shakespeare," then anyone really - can come along and have the system show "all resources tagged with Shakespeare" and get back a list of all resources added by anyone in the system tagged "Shakespeare."

You might hear this referred to as a "folksonomy" - that's a play on the word "taxonomy." Whereas a taxonomy is usually an official, top-down imposed classification scheme, a "folksonomy" is a classification scheme that is develops organically from the bottom-up through the activities of individual users.

You can optionally add a Discipline Tag and even a Blackboard Course tag. Discipline tags allow you to tag resources as being relevant to a specific discipline or even to one of the courses you're teaching or enrolled in.

Discipline Tag(s): Scholar includes a comprehensive list of Disciplines. Select one or more Discipline Tags that are appropriate for your bookmark from the drop-down list of Discipline Tags. You can also just start typing the name of a discipline and Scholar will prompt you with valid Discipline Tags from the list.

Course Tag(s): You can tag resources by course, as well. Scholar will provide a list of Blackboard courses in which you are currently enrolled. Select one or more Course Tags that are appropriate for your bookmarks from the drop-down list of Course Tags. You can also just start typing the name of one of your courses and Scholar will prompt you with the Course Titles of your list of Course Tags. And this then becomes a way for students to contribute to the course as well. Every course has a unique "coursetag", so instructors can set up streams of content filtered for that coursetag. Then as students find resources and classify it with the appropriate coursetag, that content can appear automatically in the course site. (Users can only use Course Tags from courses they are enrolled in.) And this then becomes a way for students to contribute to the course as well. Every course has a unique "coursetag", so instructors can set up streams of content filtered for that coursetag. Then as students find resources and classify it with the appropriate coursetag, that content can appear automatically in the course site.

Status Public/Private: By default all bookmarks are publicly viewable. Selecting private makes a bookmark viewable only by you; other users cannot see your private bookmarks.  If you set the Status of a bookmark to Private, a "lock" icon will appear next to that bookmark in your My Bookmarks view.

5. SHARE - You should by now be somewhat familiar with ways for individuals to use the Scholar Home page. But did you know that Scholar allows instructors to turn on a Scholar Course Homepage for each course you teach. You control what is on the Course Homepage and only you and your students can access your Course Homepage, from within your course. Try adding one or more of the following streams: a stream based on your discipline, a stream based on the course tag ( all resources bookmarked and tagged by class members with the class tag can be displayed in a stream). You can also create a stream based on a search for the course tag and your User Name (to show all resources that you have added with the course tag) or the course tag and a librarian's User Name (to show the resources collected by a librarian) for use by the students.

Instructors can use this feature to

To Set Up a Scholar Course Home:

  1. From within your Blackboard course's Tool menu, click on "Scholar Course Home"
  2. Select a Discipline. Scholar will use this to create a stream on your Scholar Course Home page.
  3. Click "Register Course" . That's all it takes. Scholar opens to your Scholar Course Home page. You will notice your Scholar Course Home page has two default streams even if no results are found: one based on the Course and the other based on the Discipline. (From now on, the Scholar Course Home link opens to this page; this site is also available to students in the class. )
  4. To start setting up the site, you should create an initial bookmark, using this first bookmark to begin populating your Course Tag Cloud with key tags. Click the "Add a Bookmark" button.
    1. Title your bookmark with key Course Tags.
    2. Use the URL of the Course in this initial bookmark (since the reason for this initial tag is simply to begin building the Course Tag Cloud with key topics for your students.
    3. Add your key tags
    4. Tag it with the Course Tag so your tags will be pulled into the Course Tag Cloud.
  5. Once this tag has been saved, you can now see the key tags in your Course Tag Cloud. Now if students are instructed to use these tags and the Course Tag when they bookmark resources, they will all be connected to this Scholar Course site.

Let's review how to add an Instructor-reviewed Stream to the Scholar Course Home. Perform a search for all the resources tagged with one of the key course tags, e.g. "anatomy". Save the search stream under a suitable name, and check Scholar Course Home. It is helpful to also save it to your My Scholar Home so you can monitor it and discover new resources. Now this stream on your My Scholar Home site may include some sites you have vetted, but a large number you have not vetted. You can drill down further to find only the resources you have vetted, using an Advanced Search, and the same keyword, but also search by your username. This will find only resources tagged with the key tag, that you have already reviewed. Save this search as "Reviewed Anatomy Resources", adding it to your Scholar Course Home as well as your Scholar Home. You can view your Scholar Course Home by clicking on the blue "Course" tag in the upper right. Students visiting the Scholar Course Home now have access to the "Reviewed Anatomy Stream".

Periodically review the General Anatomy Stream on your My Scholar Home. to discover any new, dynamically added, "anatomy" resources. If you find a resource you like, copy it to your personal collection with the Copy icon to the right of the entry. Whenever you copy a resource to your Scholar Home, this also dynamically adds it to any username-reviewed Stream on the Scholar Course Home. This procedure is a useful technique for capturing resources using multiple Search criteria and saving the resulting Stream to a Scholar Course Home:

All Streams saved on the Scholar Course Home are also saved in the Instructor's own account. So you can add any previously created Stream to this course, or any other of your courses, using the "Add a Stream" button. This button makes it possible to choose from all your previously saved searches, to add it to your Scholar Course Home as a Stream. And of course the various Streams can be re-arranged on the screen.

Remember to

  1. Register Your Course with Scholar
  2. Tell Your Students to Get Scholar Accounts
  3. Add an Initial Bookmark to Your Course Tag Cloud to Load Your Tags
  4. Point Your Students Towards the Course Tag Cloud

Click Here to view a video tutorial for setting up Scholar Course Home

In addition to helping locate relevant, reliable resources more easily, there are several ways you can integrate Scholar resources in your Blackboard course:

  1. Scholar Course Home - you can display customized Scholar resource collections as a new course tool. You 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 your choice. (e.g. the most recent bookmarks tagged with "DNA" and discipline tagged with "Nursing" saved by instructors).
  2. Update your course automatically with dynamic content feeds
  3. Enable student contributions to course collections
  4. Share resources among peers with similar disciplines and interests
  5. Scholar Bookmarks and Scholar Stream content types - you can embed individual Scholar Bookmarks or dynamic Streams build off Saved Searches in your course as custom content items.

Collect all of your bookmarks in Scholar for easy access from any computer and easy use in your research and teaching:
You can import existing bookmarks/favorites from your browser, or from another social bookmarking service (like del.icio.us) into Scholar. First, you export or save your bookmarks from your browser or del.icio.us account to an html file. Second, you import this file into Scholar. [http://wiki.scholar.com/display/SCLR/Importing+Bookmarks]

Within My Bookmarks view, you have an Edit icon to the right of each bookmark.  Clicking this icon opens the Edit Bookmark form. You can make any changes and click Save to update the bookmark. For more information on the fields in this form see the Add a Bookmark help page. (You can only Edit your own bookmarks; the Edit icon does not appear when you are in other views, such as "All Bookmarks", "Popular URLs" or another user's bookmarks view).

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Seven Things You Need to Know about Social Bookmarking (Educause Learning Initiative)

Jim Morrison's Presentation

Jim Morrison's Recommendations for Campus Rollout

Source: http://wiki.scholar.com/display/SCLR/Home

Practical Examples of Using Blackboard Scholar for Social Bookmarking by Eric Kunnen and Garry Brand Grand Rapids Community College

Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist at Kansas State and has, along with students, produced several popular videos, including “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” and "A Vision of Students Today"

From Tagging to Teaching: Practical Examples of Using Blackboard Scholar for Social Bookmarking

Netscape Bookmark File Format: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa753582.aspx

Blackboard's Help Sheet

 

---------------------------------------------------                        Scholar Networks                         ------------------------------------------

Scholar Networks consist of relationships of three types: Friends, Favorites and Fans.

Friends (a two-way relationship where both people have actively consented) One user invites another to be "Friends", and the other user must accept that invitation for the two of them to become Friends. Creating a network of friends allows you to 1) search for bookmarks from your friends, 2) create streams on your Scholar Home page to track what resources your Friends are sharing, and 3) limit access to certain profile information to your Friends.

Your Friends show up in your Network under the Friends tab. The process of adding a friend is as follows:

  1. I invite you to be Friends
  2. You get an email invitation, as well as a notification within Scholar >>more on Notifications
  3. You accept the invitation
  4. You and I are now Friends
  5. You now show up in my Network, and I show up in your network under the Friends tab

You can invite anyone to be your Friend from several places throughout Scholar:

Favorites are one-way relationships in which one users selects another user as one of their Favorites on Scholar. A user might add another to their Favorites for any number of reasons, including having similar interests, finding their bookmark collection to be especially interesting or relevant, etc. You can limit bookmark searches to just your Favorites network and build streams to keep you up to date on your Favorites resources. Your Favorites show up in your Network in the Favorites tab.

You can add anyone to your Favorites from several places throughout Scholar:

Once you have added someone to your Favorites using one of the ways above, this will immediately add them to your Network as Favorites and you will show up in their Network as their Fan.

Fans: Fans are the people that have added you to their Favorites. Fans let you see which Scholars are interested in the resources you're sharing - it's a great way to build new relationships with people who are likely to have similar interests. For example if I add you to my Favorites, I become your Fan and I will show up in your Network under the Fans tab. If you add me to your Favorites, then you are my Fan and I can see you in my Network under the Fans tab ( http://wiki.scholar.com/display/SCLR/Home)

User-defined Tags: (aka "folksonomies")

As you add resources to Scholar, you can classify them by assigning each a number of "tags." Tags are simply one or two word descriptions meaningful to the user and assigned to the resources by the users themselves.

If different people happen to assign the same tag to a number of resources, they're automatically building a shared collection. So what if I add a Bookmark and tag it with "Shakespeare" and someone else finds a different website that they also tag with "Shakespeare." Now anyone can have the system show "all resources tagged with Shakespeare" and get back a list of all bookmarks in the system tagged "Shakespeare."

We've even created Discipline and Course tags in the system that allow you to tag resources as being relevant to a specific discipline or even to one of the courses you're teaching or enrolled in.

You might hear these tags referred to as creating a "folksonomy" - that's a play on the word "taxonomy." Whereas a taxonomy is usually an official, top-down imposed classification scheme, a "folksonomy" is a classification scheme that is develops organically from the bottom-up through the activities of individual users.

Sharing Resources among Peers and Colleagues

Resources in Scholar are public by default, so everytime you add a resource to Scholar, you're automatically sharing it with the other users in the system. Of course, if you don't want to share a resource, you can mark it as private so only you can see that you've bookmarked it. But the more people share the more valuable the service becomes. 
DISCOVER relevant, reliable resources more easily

Of course, with lots of resources in the system you'll want ways to discover them. You can browse resources by tags, and we've built really robust search into the system that allows you to find resources. 

Evaluating Quality of Scholar Resources

Scholar can Help Evaluate Resources Better Than a search engine.

  1. First, Scholar is only open to Blackboard users, so you know all these resources come from folks in education.
  2. Plus, you can see the comments that users have written about the resources they've added to Scholar.
  3. You can even see what the most popular resources are - system-wide or just for a specific discipline.
  4. With the search capabilities, you can even search by institution or by whether the user who added the resource is an instructor or a student or other criteria to help you find the kinds of resources that are meaningful to you. 


UPDATE courses automatically with dynamic content streams

Scholar is integrated into the course as well. You can set up what we call "streams" and add them to your course. A "stream" is a set of dynamically updated bookmarks based on whatever criteria you want to define for them. So for example, I could set up a stream to show all bookmarked resources that have been tagged with "Shakespeare," or I can get really specific: show all resources tagged with "research" in the discipline of "nursing" that were added by instructors at Drexel University!

When this stream is added to the course, everytime a user views the stream it will by dynamically updated to pull the most current criteria from Scholar that the instructor defined when they set up the stream.

Instructor and Student Contributions to Blackboard Courses:
Every course has a unique "coursetag", so instructors can set up streams of content filtered for that coursetag. Then as students find resources and classify it with the appropriate coursetag, that content can also appear automatically in the course site.

For Additional Information on Scholar click on the Help button (upper right) or visit http://wiki.scholar.com/display/SCLR/Home