Tama’s eLearning Blog

Blackboard quietly announced Scholar, their social bookmarking tool, during early January. Here’s part of the announcement:

… you can check Scholar out at http://www.scholar.com for a little hands-on exploration, and even subscribe to RSS feeds of various bookmark views. But a lot of the cool stuff that’s the “customized for education” part requires a Blackboard Building Block or PowerLink to be installed on your Blackboard Learning System. So since you can’t see it all from the public site, I’ll describe it a bit here.What makes Scholar different from other social bookmarking services you may have used or heard of (e.g. del.icio.us) is how it works in an education setting. Scholar has all the typical features you’d expect from a social bookmarking service (tagging, tag clouds, RSS feeds, a bookmarklet for browser integration, etc.), but we wanted to make social bookmarking more relevant for Blackboard-powered courses and academic research. We spent a lot of time thinking about the problems students and faculty encounter when they go about doing web research or building engaging courses, and gettting feedback on those ideas about how social bookmarking could be enhanced for education.

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while will know that I’m not a fan of the big LMSes, of which Blackboard is the biggest, releasing scaled-down tools which claim to have the infrastructure of social software but cut back on who can use these tools (such as WebCT’s initial blog tool). Scholar, to my mind, is pointless because there is almost nothing gained by using Blackboard’s version and it locks out all non-Blackboard users (from contributing; they can still access bookmarks, they can’t store any). Check out their info page (click the image to enlarge):

The folks over at EdTechPost made this rather important comment in Scholar’s wake:

sure I’d love to see systems that instead of creating additional silos and enclaves allowed users to move in an authenticated form from the institution’s systems to ones out on the general web, you know, have my cake and eat it too. But the customers (that’s you, right) have got to demand this, not expect vendors whose whole business model is ‘lock in’ to simply just provide it.

I couldn’t agree more. So demand we must.

Let me emphasise why I think Scholar is a mistake and why we should demand it not be used: Public social bookmarking services like del.icio.us are open to everyone. They are truly social in the sense that anyone (online) can contribute and use the service. A course which uses a properly social software tool like this enhances students’ understanding of a tool they can use in other contexts (both in and outside of educational settings) and allows students to keep/build upon their initial bookmarking/annotation of the web. Scholar, by contrast, is linked to a proprietary LMS which users will cease to have access to once they leave their educational institution. Moreover, this tool is not, nor is intended to be, available outside of educational settings. Teaching students with tools they can learn for life with makes a lot more sense to me than tools which can only be used in a particular black box which students will cease to be able to open after a period of time.

e-Clippings blog is similarly vitriolic in their dislike for Scholar. What do you think?