I joined the CUNY Academic Commons yesterday over breakfast. I’ve been meaning to dig into the commons since our Instructional Technologist sent me the link a few weeks ago, soon after I posted to the faculty listserv and my space on the college website a small collection of e-learning tools faculty might consider as alternatives to Blackboard.

Recent conversations about e-portfolio and platforms gave me the nudge to poke around in WordPress mu from an individual blogger perspective, and the AC seemed like an easy place to do some poking.

I was pleased to see that I’m getting in on the ground floor in the commons; there are still fewer than 100 people on the commons, and things are just getting rolling. I was also pleased to see some active discussion under way on e-portfolio, and on alternatives to the Bb behemoth. I took the time to create a blog in the mu site, and to do some customizing along lines of a possible student e-portfolio framework.

I was really very excited to see that they’ve integrated Mediawiki and BuddyPress into the Academic Commons.  Wiki and social networking are two must haves for any e-portfolio implementation that purports to look forward.  I am somewhat less excited by what I’m discovering about the limited admin priviledges available to the WordPress author under the Multi User version of the blog tool.  (Coming from full admin priviledges in my own WP blog, perhaps anything less than total control would seem like a restriction.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Pedagogy, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.