Faculty Rollout Email - Scholar Wiki

SAMPLE COMMUNICATION FOR FACULTY - cut and paste in an email to your faculty to get them started!

Dear Faculty,

Recently, we rolled out a new tool to help you in your everyday studies and research.

Introducing Scholar

Scholar, the first property from the Blackboard Beyond Initiative, is a free social bookmarking site, customized for education, and integrated with the Blackboard Learning System™ products. Built on the principles of Web 2.0, Scholar provides you and your students with an exciting new way find educationally valuable resources on the web and use them in your everyday teaching and research.

What is Social Bookmarking All About?

Social bookmarking offers an increasingly popular way to find, save, classify, evaluate and share Internet resources. Users can save or "bookmark" favorite Web sites and classify, or "tag", them anyway that works for them. Their bookmarks are then added not only to their personal list, but also to the overall repository where others can see them. (That's the "social" part.). Students and instructors can then use each other's classifications, as well as any of the other information they now have on those resources (who saved it, how many people saved it, etc.) to evaluate and find what they are looking for.

What Do You Mean by 'Customized for Education'?

Scholar customizes social bookmarking for education - making it even more valuable to Blackboard instructors and students in a number of ways.

Users can find resources based on the academic credentials and interests of the people sharing them.
Instructors can use the social bookmarking as a course tool, pulling dynamic, current information into the course, as well as allowing students to add to the collection of course resources.
Scholar is integrated directly into the Blackboard Learning System™ - right at the fingertips of instructors and students for instant use in research, studies, or courses.

Why is This Important to Me?

Practically every student and instructor around the world does web research as part of their academic work. They might look for resources for a particular course or assignment, or for research in their discipline or specialty. But the deluge of information from the Web can make it very difficult to quickly and easily find educationally valuable sites, or to keep track of the resources that you've already reviewed and vetted. Scholar offers a solution to these challenges, by allowing you to:

STORE bookmarks in a central online service for anytime, anyplace access
CLASSIFY bookmarks via user-defined tagging (aka "folksonomies") to organize and make them easier to find
SHARE resources among peers and colleagues
DISCOVER relevant, reliable resources more easily
EVALUATE the quality of the resources based on other users who have tagged, tags, popularity, etc.
UPDATE courses automatically with dynamic content streams and pull Scholar resources right in line with Course materials.
ENABLE student contributions to course collections

Best of all you get to take these resources with you, if you work at several institutions, move institutions or you retire. Your account remains accessible on http://www.scholar.com, free for life.

How Can I Get Access Started?

It's a click away! Just click on the new Scholar tab in Blackboard and create your account! It's really that easy!

After you have created your account, you may want to follow these quick and easy steps to start building your collection and using Scholar in your courses:

Set up the Scholar Bookmarklet - this allows you to add websites to your Scholar collection as you find them, with one click from your browser. (For more info - visit Installing and Using the Scholar Bookmarklet)
Import your existing bookmarks from your browser or another social bookmarking service. (For more info - visit Importing Bookmarks)
Register your course with Scholar and build your Scholar Course Homepage with dynamic, up-to-date streams of relevant Scholar resources. (For more info - visit Registering a Course with Scholar)

How is Scholar Being Used at Other Institutions?

To learn more about the (short) history of Scholar and how one school is already seeing an impact on everyday teaching and learning, read the Blackboard newsletter article:

http://www.blackboard.com/company/newsletters/ASApril2007a.htm

Do you have a few colleagues who along with you are interested in Scholar but you have some questions or would like some help getting started? Just click on the Contact Us link after logging into Scholar or email the Blackboard Beyond Team at beyond@blackboard.com and they can set up a short web seminar or phone call to address your groups questions and get you all started smoothly.

Go forth and Scholar!

>>View Student Version