With Scholar, You Can...
STORE bookmarks in a central online service for anytime, anywhere access
First, Scholar allows you to bookmark links to resources - anything on the web that has a URL - and store in a central online service instead of as Bookmarks or Favorites in your browser. That way no matter where you are, if you have internet access you'll have access to your bookmarks - anytime, anyplace.
CLASSIFY bookmarks via user-defined tagging (aka "folksonomies")
As you add resources to Scholar, you can classify them by assigning them "tags." Tags - or sometimes you might see them called "labels" in other products - are simple one or two word descriptions that are meaningful to the user and assigned to the resources by the users themselves.
As different people describe things with the same tag, they're automatically building a shared collection. So if I add a resource and tag it with "Shakespeare" and someone else comes along and finds a different resource that they tag with "Shakespeare," then I or that other user - or anyone really - can come along and have the system show "all resources tagged with Shakespeare" and get back a list of all resources added by anyone in the system tagged "Shakespeare."
We've even created Discipline tags in the system that allow you to tag resources as being relevant to a specific discipline or even to one of the courses you're teaching or enrolled in.
You might hear this referred to as a "folksonomy" - that's a play on the word "taxonomy." Whereas a taxonomy is usually an official, top-down imposed classification scheme, a "folksonomy" is a classification scheme that is develops organically from the bottom-up through the activities of individual users.
SHARE resources among peers and colleagues
Resources in Scholar are public by default, so everytime you add a resource to Scholar, you're automatically sharing it with the other users in the system. Of course, if you don't want to share a resource, you can mark it as private so only you can see that you've bookmarked it. But the more people share the more valuable the service becomes.
DISCOVER relevant, reliable resources more easily
Of course, with lots of resources in the system you'll want ways to discover them. You can browse resources by tags, and we've built really robust search into the system that allows you to find resources.
EVALUATE the quality of the resources
Scholar can help you make better evaluations about resources than a search engine. First, Scholar is only open to Blackboard users, so you know all these resources come from folks in education. Plus, you can see the comments that users have written about the resources they've added to Scholar. You can even see what the most popular resources are - system-wide or just for a specific discipline. With the search capabilities, you can even search by institution or by whether the user who added the resource is an instructor or a student or other criteria to help you find the kinds of resources that are meaningful to you.
UPDATE courses automatically with dynamic content streams
Scholar is integrated into the course as well. You can set up what we call "streams" and add them to your course. A "stream" is a set of dynamically updated bookmarks based on whatever criteria you want to define for them. So for example, I could set up a stream to show all bookmarked resources that have been tagged with "Shakespeare," or I can get really specific: show all resources tagged with "research" in the discipline of "nursing" that were added by instructors at Drexel University!
When this stream is added to the course, everytime a user views the stream it will by dynamically updated to pull the most current criteria from Scholar that the instructor defined when they set up the stream.
CONTRIBUTE resources to courses, whether instructor or student
And this then becomes a way for students to contribute to the course as well. Every course has a unique "coursetag", so instructors can set up streams of content filtered for that coursetag. Then as students find resources and classify it with the appropriate coursetag, that content can appear automatically in the course site.