What is Scholar?

“Blackboard Scholar® is a social bookmarking service customized for education.  It provides an exciting new way for students and instructors to find educationally valuable resources on the Web. Using the knowledge and power of [a] network of educational users, Scholar will make it easier for instructors and students to find relevant resources on the Internet for courses and research. Furthermore, by storing and sharing associated information with each resource such as tags, disciplines, other users who have tagged and more, Scholar will allow users to evaluate the resources and find the most relevant and reliable. And it is directly integrated within the Blackboard Learning System(TM) - Enterprise, Vista, and CE Licenses, providing easy access right within the course environment.”

 (cited from Scholar Wiki: http://wiki.scholar.com/display/SCLR/About+Scholar)

How to Get It

Scholar is free for Blackboard users. As a course instructor, you can activate the Scholar Powerlink to make Scholar available in your course.

The Scholar Powerlink is located in the "Add Content Link" menu. Two Scholar services are available in the menu: My Scholar Home and Scholar Course Home.

Figure1. Scholar Powerlink Location

How It Works

You can employ Scholar by following these 4 simple steps:

Step 1: Create your account (in My Scholar Home)

Step 2: Register the course (in Scholar Course Home)

Step 3: Install Scholar Bookmarklet

Step 4: Start Bookmarking

How It Looks

Two Scholar services: Figure 2: Scholar Course Home and Figure 3: My Scholar Home. See the comparison table of the two.

Figure 2. Scholar Course Home

Figure 3. My Scholar Home