social paper

About Social Paper

Social Paper is a non-proprietary socialized writing environment developed by and for The CUNY Academic Commons. First envisioned by Graduate Center students as part of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy program, Social Paper’s development has been made possible by a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Start-Up Grant and a CUNY Advance Grant. Social Paper’s introduction at the GC is part of an ongoing student initiative that aims to create a durable student commons that transcends institutions.

For Graduate Center Students

What if you could browse through the writing of all Graduate Center students — in every discipline and at every stage — in order to better know your community, reach out to new peers, and discover role models and support for shaping your academic identity and activities? Read more here about how Social Paper can help create participatory and collaborative student writing communities, browse public papers and comment activity, or simply start writing.

For CUNY professors

Help build a collaborative, participatory student writing community at The CUNY Graduate Center by using Social Paper in your class. Start by reading why collaborative, networked writing is important for graduate and undergraduate education, learn how Social Paper is more student-centered than other platforms, and easily set up Social Paper for your class on The CUNY Academic Commons.

1. If you haven’t already, register for The CUNY Academic Commons using your CUNY email address. (You can change your email address for notification purposes later). Log on.

2. Go to https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/papers. Click the blue “Create New Paper” button in the upper right corner.

3. Begin writing in the editor, or copy and paste a piece of writing — from a class or a paper — into the editor. It doesn’t have to be perfect or complete – your peers will help you think through the process!

4. Click the gear in the bottom left of the screen to open up the paper settings. Choose whether you want to make your paper public, or private except for selected users, or selected Commons groups.

5. Click the blue “Publish” button on the bottom half of the screen. If you want to ask a question about your work, leave a comment on one of your paragraphs. Even better, notify a particular user of your question by mentioning their username preceded by the “@” symbol in the comment (i.e. “@username”). If you want to share your paper with a broader audience, copy and paste the paper link into one of your social media platforms.

6. Navigate back towards the Social Paper hub page by clicking on the link at the top left of the screen, or going to https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/papers. Select someone else’s paper to read and leave a comment either on a paragraph or at the end of the paper.

7. Tell a Graduate Center peer to repeat steps 1 through 7.

About Social Paper

For Graduate Center Students

For CUNY professors

7 steps towards a more collaborative Graduate Center student writing community

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