Greetings 494 students. I’m excited to meet you and work with you this term. The first step to doing so will be joining this site, which we’ll use (along with a related “group”) to share and comment on informal writing and other assignments over the course of the term. There’s a two-step process for joining: a) join the CUNY Academic Commons, a free/open resource for CUNY faculty/staff/students to collaborate on the web; and b) accept the invitation I’ll send you once you’ve joined the Commons.

Here’s how to join the Commons:

1. Head to the CUNY Academic Commons: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/
2. Click “Register” in the top right corner.
3. Create a username. I prefer first name+last initial: mine would be jeffa.
4. Use a CUNY email address to register. This can be changed later through “My profile”. (see next section)
5. Enter your full name. You can make this private later.

6. Some other fields are optional but please DO indicate your College.
7. Indicate your Role as an Undergraduate Student
8. Other fields can be filled in later in your profile.
9. Agree to the Terms of Service (You own your own data!)

Two notes: a) you can skip the prompt that asks you to create your own blog, though if you want to play around with this functionality, feel free; and b) if you want to change your email from your Hunter email to a different account that you check more frequently, here’s how you do it:

To edit a Commons profile:

1. Sign in to the Commons with your newly created username and password
2. Click the arrow in the upper right-hand corner of the page
3. Select “My Profile”. This takes you to your public profile
4. Use the “Edit Profile” button to make changes.
5. Change the contact email, picture, and other information here.

Finally, you’ll sign up with hypothes.is, an annotation platform (also free/open) that allows you to comment on materials on our site (and just about anything else on the web). To sign up, navigate to hypothes.is, click on GET STARTED in the upper right corner, and follow the prompts. You can add the extension to Chrome (or the applet to other browsers) if you like, but I’ve enabled it for our site such that you don’t need to do this.