‘Scholar’ is an idea as old as humanity. A scholar is a seeker of knowledge, a learner, a thinker, an innovator. Common Ground has created a web environment to support knowledge communities of all kinds, from children learning in schools to the most advanced academic research communities. Scholar environment is a space designed specifically for creating, evaluating and sharing knowledge and to support learning.

Scholar moves beyond the fragmented and chaotic world of emails, social media posts and documents—the world of personal computing as we know it today. It brings to you into the world of a new, smoothly integrated communication and collaboration paradigm we call ‘interpersonal computing’.

Making the most of the latest ‘cloud’ computing technologies, you can use Scholar to create shared works, and get various forms of feedback on these works as you create them, including reviews, annotations and surveys. You can create projects in publishing communities where the members of the group collaborate. You can publish these works to the web, share them with each other or with the world. Your community members and (if you allow them access) the public can talk around your works, or about other things of interest to your knowledge community.

For Schools:

Scholar transforms the classroom into a site of peer-to-peer learning. Students are motivated when they get helpful feedback they from their peers. They also learn as they develop capacities to talk with others about knowledge and learning. The old, teacher-directed ‘one-hand-up-at-a-time’ classroom is transformed into a community of constant mutual support, participatory responsibility and lateral learning.

At the Frontiers of Innovation:

Scholar is the ideal place for the creation and publication of new knowledge, from informal posts that prompt conversations among peers, to formal peer review and publication of journal articles and books. It represents a quantum leap beyond the old fashioned document formats, change-tracking routines, and file-shuffling publication systems.

For once and for all, Creator leaves behind the world of typographic markup invented by Johannes Gutenberg and his successors in the second half of the fifteenth century. Information architecture must be explicitly designed for a heading or subheading to look different. With Creator’s revolutionary ‘structure’ tool, you can rapidly plan texts, and drag and drop different elements of the text as your ideas evolve.

Creator also ends the ghettoization of different communication modes. You can just as easily add videos, sound, images or any other file as you can type text—all at once, and all together in the same space. Creator is like a blog, a word processor, a video site, an image site and a file upload site. But because it is all of these things, it also something different. It is a genuinely multimodal creation space.

Perhaps the most powerful of all its features are the parallel ‘work’ and ‘about the work’ spaces. These are divided by a curtain which can be pulled backwards and forwards depending on your focus for the moment—the work is on the left, and on the right are the social and feedback dialogues about the work (reviews, annotations and survey … with more tools to come).

For Schools:

Imagine students writing a science report in which they can include a video of the experiment that they have captured on a phone. Imagine students writing collaborative works in which you and they can see who wrote what. Imagine the power of peer learning as students give each other structured feedback using the review, annotations and survey tools. ‘No more pencils, no more books’, children used to say at the end of the school year. In the era of web-enabled devices, this will be the story in a literal sense every day of the year. In fact, it will mean a new era of anytime-anywhere, or ubiquitous, learning. Students will be able to learn just as powerfully when they are not physically sitting in the classroom. The traditional classroom, and traditional learning, will never be the same.

At the Frontiers of Innovation:

Researchers and authors will be able to create in a collaborative web environment everything from short works to works as long and complex as reports and books. They will be able to seek systematic, private feedback. They will be able to include videos, image, sound, datasets and any other file. They will be able to share their finished works with the world in print or electronic formats.

Publisher allows you to design and manage publishing projects. As a publisher, you can decide who will be involved and invite them to join in. You can plan who does what, in what order, and by what deadline. You can ask people to review, annotate or complete surveys on the work, either anonymously or with the creator and the person giving the feedback knowing each other’s identity.

You can also customize your publishing tools: create a review format, suggest annotation criteria or design a survey. You can save these to use again in a later project, or share with others to use in their projects.

For Schools:

Teachers can simply and conveniently manage projects involving the whole class, or different students or groups of students doing different projects. They can create review formats, suggest annotation criteria and design surveys—all of which will provide both the teacher and the student with valuable formative and summative assessment data.

At the Frontiers of Innovation:

Publisher is the most comprehensive, easy-to-use and systematic knowledge evaluation and project management infrastructure available today. It is ideally suited for knowledge, design, and cultural communities – professional or amateur – supporting powerful of modes of community evaluation

In Bookstore, individuals and communities can decide which of their finished works they want to make available within their community or to wider world through the web. Electronic materials can be made available for free or at a price, and libraries can purchase subscriber access for priced material. Printed books and other physical products can also be offered through Bookstore.

For Schools:

Once published by their teacher, children’s work appears in their own bookstore, as well as the class bookstore created by their teacher. Of course, these will mostly be free, but there is no reason why a collection of student works could not be created as a school fundraiser, for instance, and made available in print or electronic formats.

At the Frontiers of Innovation:

Bookstore is a fully functioning service for self-managing knowledge communities and conventional publishers. It provides a self-managed avenue for authors to take their work directly to the world—for free or at a charge. To charge or not to charge is a strategic decision to be made by the bookstore owner. Bookstore can also serve as the basis for sustainability strategies in which non-profit groups, businesses, research institutes or teaching departments create a supplemental revenue stream.

For Schools:

Where teachers and students can self-manage a schedule of student or expert presentations.

At the Frontiers of Innovation:

For conferences which have a focus on participant knowledge sharing more than listening. Includes calls for presentations, program scheduling, conference registration, and pre-or post-conference publication using Creator and Publisher.

Community is all of the things we have come to expect in today’s social media, but in one, seamlessly integrated space. As much it is reminiscent of existing social media, Community is also subtly different. It has an activity stream that does not restrict the lengths of posts. It connects people using the logic of ‘peers’ rather than ‘friends’ or ‘followers’. You can share personal profile information as widely as a community allows, but also supplement this with a portfolio of your works—both published works in your Bookstore and unpublished works in a ‘shares’ space. You can create new Communities in which you assume the role of ‘community admin’.

For Schools:

Every student has their own personal learner portfolio and community learning page, powerfully secured for under-18s by two layers of adult sponsorship and not requiring an email address for sign-up. Each class can also have their own Community page with the teacher as admin. Students can, with teacher permission, also set up communities.

At the Frontiers of Innovation:

Academic research groups, amateur interest groups, businesses, publishers, community organizations and teaching departments can use Community to stay connected with present and past community members, and make connections with new members.