On monday met someone from USA - Blackboard who was telling us about Scholar (thats me and the VLE Managers from the other 2 Bristol educational establishments).
What is it? Well its a social bookmarking site that is free but limited to Blackboard Users - like "delicious". Where it differs is in that it allows you to link the bookmarks (and searches of others bookmarks) into the courses that you are teaching on Blackboard. Also it would tend to be an educationally based set of bookmarks rather than a general one like delicous (I have already divided them in my mind into fun-delicious and work-Scholar).
So one question I have for myself is, is it going to be a case of Delicious Vs Scholar OR Delicious & Scholar. And if the second would a meta bookmarking site that allowed you to search all the various bookmarking sites you have signed up for be a good idea (like Excite did for social networking sites).
Moving onto the Pedagogy how can this be used by my colleages? Well hopefully they will come up with loads of ideas themselves but lets start with the simple ones
- Timesaver -Adding in standard websites (any single website that they find through Scholar) these have been added by a human and so should have a fighting chance of being a) educational and b) relevant. At a minimum it should reduce time spent looking at irrelevant websites.
- Adding a search - by adding a search to a course (that returns say 10 results) you are starting your students off on their research in the right direction without totally specifying what they see (as you specify what the search terms are but not what is returned by the search).
- Learner activity - bookmark and tag resources on X. This works in several ways, learners have practice in finding a resource, they learn how to tag properly (hmm is there a defined "properly" would a better word be "well"). And when they have finished the teacher has a bunch of resources that then can search for an imbed in a future version of the course.
Keywords: Social Bookmarking
Comments
Hi Joseph
A colleague uses Simpy for this. He has created a group for a module he teaches and the students all contribute to adding, annotating and tagging links. It seems to work very well. Apparently resources can be tagged at different levels i.e. a resource can be tagged as relevant to the whole module, a topic, a particular case study, a lecture, a tutorial meeting, an exam question or essay title, etc. The tag cloud is also structured in a way that represents different levels. Although he is very impressed with the sysem and the results he is constantly looking for an evaluating other systems. I suspect he would see advantages in having this sort of thing outside a VLE or a particular community. I'll ask him!