From CUNY Academic Commons

Contents

First Steps

To register and get started on the CUNY Academic Commons, follow this
link
or just click on the “Join” image on the CUNY Academic Commons home page, under “Getting Started”:

Please note that the Commons is open to CUNY faculty, staff, and graduate students only. An active CUNY e-mail address is required to proceed. We cannot support undergraduate students or course websites at this time.

There are really only four fields that are required for initial registration. All the others are optional, and may be entered at registration time, or later (by editing user profile). Here are the minimal requirements to get started:

  1. User Name: must not have spaces – example: JaneDoe
  2. email address – must be an active CUNY e-mail address
  3. Full Name
  4. CUNY College – pick from drop-down list.  You can choose more than one college.
  5. Role – faculty, grad student, alumnus/a, postdoc, other …

You also need to read the Terms of Service and agree to them to register.

Optional Fields

While it is not necessary to enter any other fields to register, it may be convenient at this point to enter more about yourself and starting building your Commons profile. Remember all this can be updated at a later point.

The following optional fields are available:

  • Title
  • Academic Interests
  • Phone
  • e-Mail
  • Website Address
  • Blog Address
  • Twitter ID
  • IM
  • Linked-in ID
  • Flickr ID
  • youTube ID
  • FaceBook Profile Link
  • Delicious ID
  • Skype ID
  • FriendFeed ID

If some of this sounds foreign to you, don’t worry. If you don’t enter anything, the fields will not appear on your profile.

Profile Field Visibility

Please note that you can make these fields visible to the public, or to logged on members of the Commons, or to only your friends on the Commons. There is a “Visibility” hyperlink under each option field.  So, for example, if you want to make your phone number only visible to logged in members of the Commons, your would choose this setting:

Image:Phone.JPG

Do I want a blog?

If you know that you want a blog, you need to provide a URL and a title. The title of your blog can be changed later, but the URL will remain constant. All blogs on the commons adhere to the following URL pattern: https://xxxxxx.commons.gc.cuny.edu – where “xxxxxx” is the node that you provide here. Try to keep your blog domain name a manageable length. This will be the url you’ll want people to use to read your stuff.

Can’t decide? You can always set a blog later. You can add as many blogs as you want. Choose whether your blog is indexed and  searchable on the web or private and only known to those who know your address. For more on this, see Blog Privacy.

Completing your Registration

Once you have filled out the fields above, you click on “Registration Complete” and if you have filled out the required fields correctly, you should see this page:

You may browse your computer for a suitable avatar and upload the image now, or later, or change it whenever you want.

Activating your Account

The Commons will send you an email to activate your account. Just click on the URL provide to finalize your registration. You are now a member of the Commons!

Sometimes the confirmation email inadvertently ends up going to your “Junk” email folder, so if you do not receive your confirmation, please check there.