Research: Blackboard
Laura Blankenship April 27th, 2007
I try to set aside time each week (usually on Friday) to do research. Research for me can fall into a number of different categories. It can be much like the research most scholars do: reading articles and books and perhaps writing. It can also be reading blogs and online journals, just generally keeping up with what’s going on in the ed tech world. But sometimes it’s playing around with new tools and software. Today, I played around a bit with some Blackboard plugins that we haven’t implemented yet, but have installed on our test server. The first tool is something called Blackboard Scholar, a kind of social bookmarking tool within Blackboard. (For a review of social bookmarking, see my entry from a couple of years ago.) Blackboard is trying to implement some tools that are more Web 2.0-y. For those of you who don’t know what that means, basically, web 2.0 tools involve the ability for users to create their own content. It’s generally social in nature (i.e. people share information in a public space). The Wikipedia puts it this way:
Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004,[1] refers to a perceived second-generation of Web based communities and hosted services — such as social networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. O’Reilly Media titled a series of conferences around the phrase, and it has since become widely adopted.
One complaint I often hear about Blackboard is the closed nature of its content. It’s hard to share information from one course to another. Scholar offers one way to do this. The web site for scholar shows the bookmarks that people have added, from within Blackboard, and made public. I have to say that it’s kind of a cool tool. You can search for links that other people (from all over the world) have added or you can add your own links. Those links can be tagged, both with keywords and with course tags. The course tags might be especially useful as one is setting up new versions of courses. You can add a “stream” of links based on that course tag. You can also add streams based on discipline and keyword tags. Here’s an example of one I added for “Instructional Technology”:
Although this shows some promise, it’s still limiting. Only bookmarks added through this particular service are available for searching. Of course, this is a problem more generally since there are a number of social bookmarking services out there. It’s also not quite fully integrated with Blackboard, which makes it feel like a separate entity. Like many things in Blackboard, there are a few too many steps to add it to a course, but if you’re used to those steps, it’s not any worse. I’d like to see the ability to tag course content more generally and perhaps make those tags available across an institution. Wouldn’t it be cool if while you’re setting up your course, you have the option of searching a set of tags that would then display content from your colleagues that you could use? Then you could simply click checkboxes next to those items and voila! they are added to your course. Or maybe Blackboard Scholar could recommend links based on the tags you have for your course? Lots of possibilities if Bb will think outside the box a little.
Another tool I explored was the Google Scholar plugin for Blackboard. This is a simple tool that allows you to add items or search results to your Blackboard course. This, too, is okay, but not thrilling. It, too, is not seamlessly integrated and in fact, pops open a new window when clicked on (even as a student). That’s kind of annoying. Unlike the Bb Scholar stream above, search results aren’t displayed as a list, which I think would be a pretty nice feature, saving everyone a click.
I guess Blackboard is trying to bring the outside in a little more, allowing connections from within Blackboard to external sites in more dynamic ways, but it’s still very limited in its ability to let the inside out. The bookmarking tool makes a baby step in that direction, so we’ll see if that goes further in the future.