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.