ProfHacker Reviews CBOX in The Chronicle of Higher Education

On Dec 4, The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker Brian Croxall posted “Build Your Own Academic Community with Commons in a Box,” a comprehensive review of CBOX.

He talks about how easy it is to set up:

Setting up a CBOX website is five-steps simple and clearly explained with the site’s installation guide. I was able to go through the whole process in under ten minutes’ time, where most of that was waiting for my web host… I then installed the CBOX plugin, made a few more adjustments (as explained in steps three, four, and five), and I was ready to go! My site isn’t all that pretty or populated yet, but I’ve now got the tools to build the community.

He also focuses on CBOX’s potential uses in the classroom, and how it can “invigorate” students’ use of social media by letting them create groups for projects and use forums to discuss issues, and conveniently respond to threads via CBOX’s reply-by-email functionality.  He also sees how professors can create a community of students for all their students, where they can “overlap … learning and experiences with that of others…”

What if you’d like to run a blog, a discussion forum, and a wiki for your students to use? Or what if that community that you want to reach out to is much, much larger than a classroom? In that case, I’d recommend you check out Commons in a Box…