From Tagging to Teaching : Practical Examples of using Blackboard Scholar for Social Bookmarking CIT2007

11:00 AM From Tagging to Teaching : Practical Examples of using Blackboard Scholar for Social Bookmarking
Grand Rapids Community College
Agenda
• Define social bookmarking
• Provide an overview of Scholar
• How GRCC got started with Scholar
• Examples in Teaching and Learning
• Scholar in the future

They defined social bookmarking.
The practice of saving bookmarks to a public web site and tagging them with keywords.
Saving your bookmarks online, share resources, discover new links, and tag your bookmarks.

Social bookmarking is resource sharing. A resource is anything with a URL.

Bb Scholar is part of the Blackboard Beyond Initiative
Centrally hosted
Integrated with Blackboard
Customized for education

RSS reader

Has social networking abilities.

It must be accessed through an LMS. Accounts are free and they don’t go away.

Academic resources shared across courses and institutions throughout your academic career.

Uses the same kind of bookmarking technology as delicious bookmarks.

Has fields for tags, discipline tags, course tags.

Gave a basic explanation of folksonomies and the intelligence of crowds. Overtime people begin to use the same kinds of tags. Others begin to shape how everyone else begins to use the information.

The tag cloud feature works a lot like delicious.

Instructors can create a “Scholar Course Site” – the only ones who can access the page is the members of the class. Instructors can move the elements of the page from course to course. This still feels like how to make web 2.0 back into web 1.0.

GRCC roll out
Student orientations, e-mails, news letters, training sessions

Educational uses of Social Bookmarking:
Enhance computer literacy
Allow students to contribute to course resources
Provide student-centered learning
Social networking with an academic focus

They are using for basically gathering resources. Sharing links.

This tool is for instructors that do not understand the true power of web 2.0 and are really concerned about control and access.
They are still concerned about librarians and teachers as gatekeepers to knowledge.
There is a sharing piece to it. One of the real strengths of a true web 2.0 app is the collective wisdom of the unwashed masses. As Charlie Crawford said to me, "the barbarians are at the gates and they are not going back!"