We are excited to announce the launch of Social Paper (beta), a networked writing environment that enables students to compose and share all forms of their written work across across courses, disciplines, institutions and academic terms. Likewise, students can browse and comment on the papers of their peers.

Unlike many learning management systems or course blogs, Social Paper gives students full control over the sharing settings of each individual piece of writing. Students may choose to share a paper with a professor, a class, a writing group, the public at large, or alternately, keep it private as part of their personal, in-progress, reflective writing portfolio. Additionally, while composing, students can post comments on their writing with questions mentioning other users in order to solicit peer feedback or interest. By giving students a centralized space to manage the totality of their writing, students can easily change privacy settings as they mature as writers and thinkers, develop audiences for their growing body of work, and reflectively build off prior writing.

PEER-EMPOWERED PEDAGOGY
Social Paper enables students to easily discover the writing and comments of their peers (and future peers!), helping to open up the black box of graduate education.

SUSTAINABILITY
As a free and open source tool, Social Paper users do not have to worry about a sudden withdrawal of the tool. Additionally, users also have the freedom to modify the tool to suit their emerging needs, drawing attention to the ways our tools influence our intellectual activity.

ADVANCED SHARING CONTROL
Social Paper empowers students with advanced control over the terms of sharing and storing their work, enabling students to have complete power over who gets to see and comment upon each individual piece of writing.

NETWORKED WRITING PORTFOLIO
Social Paper will provide a centralized home for each student to compose, socialize and archive not only their writing, but also comments, both received and given, allowing students to build working relationships across courses, disciplines, institutions and academic terms.

PRIVACY
As a non-commercial tool, student-generated data is safe from corporate surveillance.

Social Paper (beta) is part of our 1.9 release, which includes a number of other improvements that we will post about in the near future. While Social Paper is released in beta, we kindly ask the Commons community to report any bugs so we can address them and improve the user experience.

Social Paper is made possible by The National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities and the City University of New York Advance Grant Program.