In Blackboard’s most recent webinars they have showcased their foray into social networking, known as Scholar. Scholar is a product of the new Blackboard Beyond Initiative. PrepNY took a peak and snapped some blurry system screenshots.
Even despite the blur, it is clear that Blackboard’s offering is sub-par. Integrated into Blackboard Scholar, the new social networking system is really an enterprise wiki in disguise created by Atlassian and operating on the same Confluence wiki system used by companies such as Global Logic to manage software development – not to be the actual development. If Arlassian uses the same dated interface to add social media capabilities to Share Point 2007, users are not in for a treat.
The main issue with Blackboard’s social networking is that it is clear that they have added technology for the sake of technology. Their system lacks severely in the way of a compelling user experience and there is no reason why anyone would choose to use the proprietary social bookmarking system over Del.icio.us or the new Mr. Wong. Backboard has designed a network (or licensed one) as quickly as possible with the goal of simply pushing a press release saying they are relevant in the web 2.0 space. This is a mistake because first impressions count and a Blackboard network deployed at a school in its current state stands little chance of success.
Specifically, the interface design is just too boring (see below) and lacks any sort of compelling differentiation from the numerous other social networking options that exist. As educators and technologists, we can make all the excuses we’d like and hold out false hopes that a vibrant community around knowledge sharing will be develop. Unfortunately this is not the case. Academic collaboration is by-product of a social network designed to stimulate USE — not vice versa.
Screen Shots:
Some Links to Related Musings:
Eric Kunnen
Keith Russell
Academic Technology Blog
The Journal
California Dreamin
November 5th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Actually, Scholar (http://www.scholar.com) is NOT based on Atlassian’s Confluence enterprise wiki at all. Scholar has been developed from the ground up by Blackboard. Confluence is used for the Help pages (http://wiki.scholar.com), but that’s all that Confluence is used for.
The purpose of Scholar is to take the basic concepts of social bookmarking and social networking and expand upon them in ways that make those concepts more relevant to use in an educational environment. In addition to the basic social software concepts, there are a lot of education-specific features in Scholar that aren’t available in services like Del.icio.us or Mr. Wong, including:
- Single sign-on between Scholar and the Blackboard Academic Suite for seamless integration with your elearning environment
- Discipline Tags for tagging resources for a specific discipline
- Course Tags for tagging resources for use in one of your courses (through integration with the Blackboard Academic Suite)
- Streams, which are dynamically updating saved searches that you can publish to a number of places: to your Scholar home, to the Blackboard Community System portal, to a Blackboard Learning System course, or as RSS
- Advanced Search capabilities that allow you to find resources by academically relevant information like institution, discipline, course, a user’s academic information (like whether they’re a professor or student, by their institution, by their degree level), etc.
- Import/export of links between Scholar and your Blackboard Learning System course
- Lots more!
Scholar is in active development and we’ve been rolling out new features every few months since the initial launch 9 months ago — and will continue to do roll out more new features in the future! It’s unfortunate you find the Scholar interface “boring” (although another way to interpret it is “simple”). Still, if you or your readers have further constructive feedback, please feel free to contact us at beyond@blackboard.com.
Thanks!
Greg Ritter
Product Director, Blackboard Beyond Initiative
Blackboard Inc.