Also new this week, Blackboard on Wednesday announced the launch of Scholar, a social bookmarking service designed to connect faculty and students. Since November (see our episode 40 - Training Opportunities) Blackboard has been working on Scholar, their first "Blackboard Beyond" service. "Scholar allows members of the Blackboard community to save and classify bookmarks and searches, share resources with faculty, students and administrators from other institutions, automatically update courses with dynamic content feeds, and enable student contributions to course collections" (Blackboard press release). It seems to be modeled on Technorati and/or del.icio.us. Scholar can be accessed publicly at http://www.scholar.com. We expect to be installing the Scholar building block in our Blackboard soon, and once we do, it will be optionally available within our online learning environment.
