Blackboard Connects Faculty and Students with Scholar
2/15/2007—Blackboard has launched a new, free service for users of its CMS technologies: Scholar, a "social bookmarking" service designed to connect faculty and students across institutions. Scholar is the first product released from the Blackboard Beyond Initiative, which focuses on centrally hosted Web services.
Social bookmarking lets users save and categorize their favorite websites and share them with a community. Scholar lets Blackboard users save and classify bookmarks and searches; share resources with faculty, students, and administrators from other institutions; automatically update courses with dynamic content feeds; and enable student contributions to course collections, according to Blackboard. Saved bookmarks can be placed in a central repository and tagged with descriptors, which can then be accessed by other Blackboard users.
The free service is available to all users of the enterprise versions of the Blackboard Learning System, including Vista and CE licenses. Blackboard users can access the service right through BLS. It's also open to the public at http://www.scholar.com. Access is delivered through the Scholar Blackboard Building Block or Scholar Blackboard PowerLink, both of which are available through the Behind the Blackboard extranet.
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About the author: Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's educational technology online publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at dnagel@1105media.com.
Have any additional questions? Want to share your story? Want to pass along a news tip? Contact Dave Nagel, executive editor, at dnagel@1105media.com.