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Colleges Use Social Networking as Academic Tool

Colleges Use Social Networking as Academic Tool
10/11/2010
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Suada Kolovic

You can’t go anywhere today without hearing the words social networking. But unlike Facebook, where students go to poke at friends and post pictures of their latest shenanigans, college campuses are attempting to harness the popularity of social networking and create online learning communities attempting to mix serious academic work, and connections among working scholars, with Facebook-style fun.

At the City University of New York, a new project called Academic Commons is connecting faculty, staff, and graduate students across the system's 23 institutions. The CUNY-only network allows its more than 1,300 users to write, share blogs, join subject groups, and participate in academic discussions.

At CUNY, registered members of Academic Commons get their own profile, where they can post information about themselves and link up with friends in groups online. The subject groups focus on topics that include open-source publishing, graduate admissions, and—on the nonacademic side—the top New York City pizza joints.

As Matthew Gold, Academic Commons' director put it, “You may not want to friend your dean on Facebook, but you still want to be connected to your dean.”

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