Scholar is an online environment for knowledge communities, harnessing collective intelligence and nurturing collaborative learning. Scholar has five publishing spaces where people work closely to create knowledge and learn. You can use just one of these, or several or all of them together.

Introducing: Community, Creator, Publisher, Conference and Bookstore

‘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. Instead, Scholar supports subtly different ideas of ‘works’, ‘notifications’, ‘messages’ and ‘updates’. It brings to you into a new world of smoothly integrated communication and collaboration. We call this new paradigm ‘interpersonal computing’.

Exploring the potentials 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, and share them with each other or with the world. Your community members, and also (depending on the privacy settings you select) 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 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 academic knowledge. It represents a quantum leap beyond the old fashioned document formats, change-tracking routines, and file-shuffling publication systems.