Academic Commons News

Many people who join the CUNY Academic Commons do so because they would like to collaborate with others across the CUNY system. The impetuses behind these collaborations range from shared academic interests to university-wide committee work to networking pages for innovative programs to intellectual explorations to just plain fun. And these kinds of collaborative efforts are exactly what the CUNY Academic Commons was intended to promote.

Our current design makes it easy for members to come together to form new groups, but we realize that we need to continue refining our interface to better allow for group conversations and collaborations. Certainly, there are a wealth of options available for group communications — group discussion forums, group wires, blogs, and wiki pages — but which ones are best and what do each of these options offer?

We’ll be writing up a series of posts in the coming weeks on these topics, and we’ll post them on the Help Blog. Please know that the development team is in the process of both assessing group needs and redesigning the group interface. We hope that both of these efforts will result in a design that better meets the needs of our members. And if you have feedback for us, please let us know in the comments of this post or by sending us an email.

Update: Please check out Maura Smale’s How Groups Can use the Commons

Image Credit: CowGummy

We were honored and excited to learn that Dan Cohen, whose titles include Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, Director of the Center for History and New Media, and Emcee of the esteemed Digital Campus Podcast, gave the CUNY Academic Commons a shout-out during a recent presentation at the University of Mary Washington. Titled “The Future of the Digital University,” Dan’s talk explored a range of new approaches to education being taken by institutions of higher education, all of which embrace the signal virtues of “openness, do-it-yourself culture, decentralization, and collaboration.”

Dan’s presentation is archived online on Ustream. At about the 15:00 mark, he brings up the CUNY Academic Commons homepage and cites it as an example of a new wave of academic social networking websites that is emerging in higher ed.

We’re very thankful to Dan for mentioning us, and we take it as a signal that the CUNY Academic Commons–a site that is still in its infancy, but one that is growing rapidly–is headed in the right direction.

We’re delighted to announce a powerful new feature of the Academic Commons that should transform its use: members of the site will now receive email notifications when new posts are made to group discussion forums.

This seems like a relatively basic function, but it was something that was missing in the native version of our platform. With this new plugin, members of the site will find it much easier to stay on top of discussions in their groups, which we hope will result in more robust conversations on the site.

Because we know that our members lead busy lives and may not desire a deluge of Commons-related email, we have designed a notification system that provides a great deal of customization. Members can easily subscribe or unsubscribe to group forums by visiting their settings page .

To see the plugin in action, please visit any group, where you’ll see a message indicating whether or not you are currently subscribed to posts in that forum. You’ll also see a link to your settings page, where you can control your subscriptions to all of your groups. Here are a few screenshots:

For more on this new feature, please check out New BuddyPress / bbPress plugin: Group Forum Subscription, a post by our developer Boone Gorges. We’re very proud of Boone’s work on this plugin, and we hope that you find it to be a useful addition to the Commons.

When the CUNY Committee on Academic Technology first unveiled the Commons back in March of 2009, one particular page on our wiki saw more activity than almost any other part of the site: the Bug-Reports page. While we weren’t happy to hear that people had problems with the site, we held fast to the belief that we should deal with any problems that came up in a public and open way.

While the site has improved in numerous ways since those early days, occasional bugs still do pop up, and a wiki page is not the ideal way to manage bug reports: it does not provide a way to track a problem from the reporting stage, through various attempts to fix the problem, to, finally, a resolution.

And that’s why I’m happy to announce our new Issues website, which members can access to report problems that they encounter as they make use of the Commons. The site is an installation of Redmine, an open-access project management solution that will enable us to keep better track of bugs affecting the site.

Although there are many benefits to using this tool, one downside is that we’ll have to ask our members to go through a quick registration process to create an account on Redmine in order to submit problems. If that poses an insurmountable bother to you, you can always tell us about site bugs by using the Contact Us page or simply by sending us an email. When we receive such communications, we’ll add them to the Issues site ourselves and track our progress as we work on those issues.

While we hope that site members will run into few bugs as they use the Commons, we know that bugs are an unavoidable part of web development. We hope that this new bug-tracking system will help us minimize such problems for our members by allowing us to deal with bugs in an open, transparent, and organized way. We appreciate, in advance, your help in making the CUNY Academic Commons run smoothly.

This is a quick post to let members of the community know that the Development team will be working on the interface for groups over the next few days. Up until now, members of groups could post to their group forums directly through the group homepage. While this was convenient, it didn’t work very well, and group members missed out on some of the bells and whistles that the forum interface provides, such as attaching files to forum posts, marking discussions as “favorites,” and subscribing to favorited posts via email.

What we’re doing now is setting up the group homepages so that they’ll display excerpts of recent forum posts, but will link directly to the forums themselves. Thus, all forum posts will now be written and read on the forums themselves.

That sounds logical, I know, but it’s a little more complicated than it appears to be. We should have everything up and running shortly, but you may notice a bit of wonkiness between now and then. In the meantime, please copy and save any important text you’re writing before you hit those “post” and “reply” buttons.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience that this might cause you, but we thank you for your patience. We should have this cleared up shortly, and we’ll update this post to give you the “all clear.”

Update (8/11/09): Our work is complete. When you visit a group’s page, you will be able to see the latest postings in its forums. But all forum-related links on group pages will now lead to the forums themselves, where you’ll be able to write new posts and reply to older ones.

Thanks for your patience and thanks to Boone Gorges for his work on this.

I hope you’ll forgive the tortured title of this post, but with Twelfth Night earning rave reviews in Central Park, I’ve got Shakespeare on the brain. Not that I’ve seen the current production — the lines are far too long for me to get in, as Joe Ugoretz can attest. (For those who fit the bill, the Senior Citizen line is reported to be much shorter than the regular one, though you’ll still need to get there early in the morning; and for those who prefer more downtown fare, check out Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, which is currently performing the play alluded to in the title to this post).

Although it has been a while since we’ve updated the News blog, that hasn’t been due to a dearth of news. Rather, it’s because the development team has been putting most of its efforts into the infrastructure of the website, as detailed in this recent post on the Development blog. Indeed, we’ve been updating the Dev blog pretty frequently with posts about new site features, plugins, and code releases.

With the Dev blog continuing to cover technological issues on the Commons, we’ll use the News blog to highlight some of the ways in which members of the Commons have been using the site. So, here’s a quick update:

Numbers:
The Commons is still in beta: we’ve opened it to the CUNY community on a limited basis, encouraging those who feel comfortable with the technology to jump in, but requesting that others less familiar with it wait until the fall, when we plan on having our help system in place. We still have not made a single large-scale announcement about the Commons; news of its existence has so far come from word of mouth.

So, here are the numbers as they stand right now, on July 17, 2009:

123 members
73 blogs
24 groups

We’re averaging between 350-400 visits per week and 2000-2400 page views per week. The average visit length is 6 minutes and 45 seconds. All of these numbers are sure to rise in the Fall, when we begin publicizing the Commons on various CUNY campuses.

Communities
One of the most heartening developments we’ve seen on the Commons has been the arrival of several CUNY groups who have been looking for an online home. Among them are LILAC (Library Information Literacy Advisory Committee) and CUNY ITUNESU Management Council Team. We have one group using the Commons to plan a conference and another using it to plan a series of monthly New-York pizza excursions.

While we’re happy to have these groups on board, we realize that we have much more to do to make the Commons more hospitable to groups. That’s one central area of focus for us this summer; if you have thoughts about how we can make the Commons work better for you or for your group, please let us know in the comments to this post.

Events
In late May, several members of the Commons (Joe Ugoretz, Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer, and I) organized a one-day conference that explored the use of WordPress in higher education. Titled CUNY WordCampEd, the event was held at the Macaulay Honors College, and it turned out to be a huge success. We used a blog on the Commons, CUNY WordCamp Ed during the event, and this post provides a roundup of the wonderful posts written about the conference. Many of those posts, especially those by Jim Groom, Luke Waltzer, Mikhail Gershovich, and Joe Ugoretz, remarked upon the ways in which the Academic Commons could serve as a virtual hub for CUNY, which Jim Groom aptly described as “a bustling, non-stop engine of difference and change.”

Wiki Work
The wiki remains a central part of this site; many thanks to Karen Greenberg, in particular, who has done a yeowoman’s job of adding content to the wiki (you can see — and try to match! — her full list of wiki edits here.

We do hope that as the Commons develops, we’ll see more movement from groups, blogs, and forums to the wiki. And we’re currently looking for members of the Commons to join us in rethinking the organization of the wiki. If you have suggestions, please let us know.

Blogs
We have so many new blogs on the Commons that it seems only fair to highlight a sampling of the most recently updated blogs:

Majoring in Meta: CUNY GC grad student Ben Miller has made the Commons his central online home. He has imported older blog posts that show him off as a reader, student, teacher, and writer.

Maura Smale has been tracking information literacy issues on her blog From the Library of Maura. Check out her wonderfully titled post, Interesting Info from the Interwebs.

Carlos Guevara just recently wrote a post asking What is podcasting?. Help him answer that question!

On The Bleeding Edge, Bruce Naples describes the technology behind QCC’s Digital Signage. It would be interesting to see how other CUNY colleges have set things up, too.

Resident poet Carl Grindley has been publishing his work on Poems in Progress. His most recent work is Reply to Browning(s).

After using the Commons to play with WordPress Multi-User, Michael Cripps announced that he is presiding over collaborating with colleagues on a new installation of WPMu at York College that will be used, at least initially, for student ePortfolios. We’re proud to claim the York installation as the first offspring of the Commons!

Other bloggers have been writing up a storm. Take a look, for instance, at Joe Rosenberg’s Fundamentals of Teaching & Learning With Technology, Joe Ugoretz’s Prestidigitation, Michael Oman-Reagan’s My God, it’s Full of Macs!, and George Otte’s Purely Reactive.

For the latest blog posts, you can always check out the Blogs link, which will list the most recently updated blogs at the top of the list.

Presenting the Commons to a Wider Audience
One of the most exciting developments around the Commons is that the Commons itself is becoming a model for other academic online communities. This is due, in part, to the publicity we have received by freely releasing our code to the public on the development blog, but it’s also due to the wonderful community that has already formed here.

We’re honored, for instance, that Jim Groom of UMW Blogs is looking to the CUNY Academic Commons for design inspiration, especially since UMW Blogs and Jim’s work more generally inspired us to get started here.

George Otte, chair of the CUNY CAT Committee and the man behind the Commons, recently presented on the Commons at the Sloan-C conference in San Francisco. George wrote a wonderful blog post about the presentation, “A picture is worth … ?”; you can see his full set of slides here. Reportedly, George’s talk was a big hit, with several members of the audience remarking afterwards that they were going to start similar projects for their own academic communities.

Summer Plans
Here are the current priorities of the development team, the things that we see as the most pressing needs on the Commons, and the tasks to which we will devote most of our energies this summer:

1. Help Section
2. Sitewide Search
3. Home Page Redesign
4. Group Pages
5. Other

Here are those items in more detail:

1. Help Section
—Create a help blog and use it to feature short screencasts (30-40 secs long)
—Create an introductory tour of the site and its features for new users.

2. Sitewide Search
—Create a search function that searches all sections of the site, including blog posts, wiki pages, profile pages, groups pages, forum posts, and activity feeds.
—Search form will allow users to search all sections or to choose certain sections for search.

3. Home Page Redesign
—Redesign home page to include new widgets (Featured Blog, Featured Group, Latest activity, etc.)

4. Group Pages
— Reshape group pages to better fit group communication needs
—Offer easy means for groups to: 1) communicate with one another 2) Provide new content
—Make group pages aggregation points for group content, but have group content produced in other sections of the site. Ex. a list of recent forum posts will show up on the group page, but forum posts will be written on the forums themselves
—Create system that allows members to easily create email subscriptions to various discussion forums

5. Other
A. Usability Issues
—Rename Wire —> Wall.

B. Bug Tracking/Communication
—We’re in the process of setting up a redmine installation to use for bug reporting

Feedback
Again, we invite your feedback on all of this. Please use the comment section to let us know what you’re thinking and how the Commons can better serve your needs.

And, to stay on top of the latest Commons news, visit the News page, follow the Commons twitter account, and check out the development blog.

The Academic Commons is still in its gestation phase — we haven’t announced it publicly, and we’ve only invited the 40-odd members of the CUNY Committee on Academic Technology to join (in fact, we’ve asked several interested parties to wait before participating) — but we’re already seeing the power of the website to make connections and share information. Here’s an update on the latest happenings on the Commons:

Design Updates

Regular users of the Commons will have noticed a major facelift on our wiki. In an effort to unify the design of various elements of the site, we have reworked the design of the wiki so that it matches the rest of the site. We still have a few things to add — look for the top gray nav bar that you seen on the home page of the site to appear on the top of the wiki early next week — but things are starting to come together. One note: the “edit” and history buttons that you used to find at the top of each wiki page can now be found in the righthand sidebar of the wiki page.

Our efforts to redesign the website have been helped by the addition of several web designers and developers to our staff. Many thanks to Zach Davis and the entire team at Cast Iron Coding and to GC Philosophy student and Queens College Instructional Technologist Boone Gorges for their help.

On the Blogs

News about the Commons seems to be happening by word-of-mouth; we’re happy to welcome several new bloggers to the site. Already, their contributions are strengthening the blogging community on the Commons:

Marcos Wasem
Marcos Wasem is a doctoral student in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He also works at the GC’s New Media Lab. Hopefully, he’ll start blogging about his fascinating poetry projects soon. Here’s his first post: How to conect to your U drive at the Gradtuate Center using VPN in Linux Ubuntu

GCmac
Anthropology grad student Michael Oman-Reagan has gotten this blog off to a running start. The blog will deal with the planning of the forthcoming Mac lab at the Grad Center, but it looks like we’ll also see tips on a variety of mac-related topics such as customizing guest user accounts in OS X and Citrix clients for mac OS. Here at the Commons, we heartily approve of Michael’s orientation towards open-source solutions to common problems, and we look forward to keeping up with his blog. For those of you interested in mac-related developments at the GC, please check out the GC Mac Media Lab group that Michael has formed.

IT Therefore I Am
Tech Fellow Kimon Keramidas has started up what looks to be a fascinating blog that will cover issues of technology and pedagogy in relation to online teaching. For a provocative exploration of the challenges involved in evaluating online work, check out The conundrum of grading in an IT age. Also check out Kimon’s handy list of ITP Resources. We expect great things from this blog!

Purely Reactive
George Otte, our fearless leader, has been blogging up a storm. In his latest posts, Sizing Up Models and Need as Opportunity, George has begun to trace out some of the important needs that the Academic Commons might fulfill. And, as usual, George is showing, not telling. This is why he is our fearless leader.

The Bleeding Edge
Blogger extraordinaire Bruce Naples continues to show us how it’s done with posts on iPhones/iPods and Brainify. Notice that on the latter post, the creator of the tool described in Bruce’s post popped in to comment. Very cool.

On the Wiki

Thanks to Karen Greenberg and Tech Fellows Bertie Ferdman, Kimon Keramidas, and Tziporah Stern, along with Phil Pecorino, we’ve seen a veritable explosion of content on the wiki.

We’ve added several new links to the Wiki homepage. Please click through to check them out, and please don’t be shy about editing pages yourself. We want to have as much collaborative editing going on as possible. Edit away!!!

Many thanks to Karen for her hard work — she has devoted a great deal of time and energy to the wiki. Let’s repay her by using and sharing those resources!!

In the Groups

We have many new and active groups going strong. You can check out a full listing here. Among our new and active groups are The GC Mac Media Lab, Games, Teaching, and Learning, and ePortfolios.

If you have an interest that you’d like to share with others, create a group!

On the Bug Reports page, Manfred noted that he was having problems uploading an avatar for his personal profile or for his group. I tried to upload an image myself and ran into some very strange problems: first, the image wouldn’t crop at all, and then it started bouncing around the page like the cards at the end of a just-won game of computer solitaire!

After browsing the BuddyPress forums, I found a post that described similar issues. One person mentioned plugin conflicts, which made me wonder whether we had any plugins that might be screwing things up.

It turned out that the culprit was the Litebox plugin for WordPress. Deactivating that plugin seemed to solve the issue.

So: you should be able to upload avatars without problems now! Please let me know whether you continue to experience issues!

We’re still in an Alpha version of the Academic Commons, but we’ve already received some wonderful contributions to the site. Here are some of the activities we’ve noted:

On the Blogs
The Bleeding Edge by Bruce Naples — check out “Online Safety Tips for Facebook Fogeys,” which provides some important guidance to newbie Facebook users.

Purely Reactive, a new blog started by our Fearless Leader George Otte, began with a bang: George’s first post, Let’s start with something cranky provides some trenchant criticism of a recent and widely publicized report by the NCTE on “Writing in the 21st Century.” Ouch!

On cstein, Chris Stein is gathering resources useful to teaching in multimedia environments.

Most other blogs seem to be in the gestation phase, but we’re looking forward to many great posts in the near future. Go, bloggers, go!!

On the Wiki
The wiki is going strong. Predictably at this early stage of the project, the Bug Reports page is seeing the heaviest action.

But we’re already seeing the potential of the Commons through the work of Karen Greenberg and Kimon Keramidas on the section “Faculty Resources for Teaching Online.” If you’re wondering what kinds of potential the Academic Commons has as a clearinghouse for important information and future collaboration, look no further: the future is here.

That’s it for now. We look forward to the next update, and we hope you do, too. Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions in the comments — we want to hear from you.