Scholar.com - Social Bookmarking for the School Set

Scholar is a relatively new educational bookmarking service managed by Blackboard Inc. which supplies software to the educational industry. Its feature set is pretty standard, stuff you’d see with the bigger players on the web, except that this is geared for learning. There’s simple and advanced searching by tag, discipline or institution. Users will need a Scholar account to create their own collection of bookmarks (the school must be a Blackboard subscriber). They can then browse other users’ bookmarks and subscribe to them via RSS. There’s a bookmarklet for pulling in new items and you can also import bookmarks from other services. New features include profiles with pictures, exporting, status updates, and interest tags.

“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 our 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.”

This is a useful resource for classrooms, especially as computers are now being used as a key teaching tool. The features are similar to other bookmarking services and importing/exporting features makes the transition simple. It’s a good way to introduce interactivity and knowledge sharing via the web.

The style and look are rigidly academic. Despite its being an educational tool, it doesn’t need to appear so. Students may find it more engaging if the interface were updated. Are instructors given an easy way to filter incoming content?