The Office of Education, Training, and Staff Development has site-licensed CommonSpace, a writing application developed by Houghton Mifflin's Sixth Floor Media group, for University use for the present year. Introduced to the product in development, faculty fellows in the Office found CommonSpace in its beta form an environment conducive to creating and organizing commentary about writing. The newly issued 1.0 version seems to be sturdier than earlier versions, and we suspect that many CUNY colleagues will find CommonSpace to be a tool that advances the deeply held pedagogical principles of wide collaboration and respectful conversation that distinguish writing instruction at CUNY.

CommonSpace is offered in both Macintosh and Windows versions and is best utilized on a network. CommonSpace offers a word processor with the kinds of text editing features that have become desirable to many faculty and students, such as font and color choice, proofing tools, and importation and exportation from and to other wordprocessing programs.

But what is so special about CommonSpace is the way it allows many writing efforts to exist within a single document. CommonSpace does this largely by creating and managing columns, the program's basic organizing unit. Writers working in CommonSpace, then, can write a draft in one column, ask questions about it in a second, get comments on the draft in a third, fourth, or fifth, do a second draft in a sixth column, and so on, building as many columns as they wish. Writers can consider on screen whatever columns help at the moment, shrinking or hiding columns as need dictates. CommonSpace columns can be linked with the commentary of one related to the selected content of another. Within the same document, a writer can start a new workspace for each draft. But it is its ability to invite and display comment by many in a single document that most distinguishes CommonSpace from other networked writing products that offer opportunity only for one-on-one comment.

CommonSpace seems not only an attractive tool for gathering and coordinating commentary, but for facilitating the creation and communication of instructional material. The program allows for the easy development of templates and question sets to guide writing projects. Instructors can develop a CommonSpace "Library" in which they store comments (grammatical, organizational, etc.) that they wish to use again and again. Reading student papers, instructors can pull comments out of the library and insert them in appropriate places in the text. Finally, for students and teachers alike, CommonSpace offers conference capabilities for online discussion.

CommonSpace is not an educational product per se, but one developed to ease collaboration in writing in any organization. Therefore CommonSpace, unlike some of the more popular networked writing applications, does not initiate and guide writing assignments. CommonSpace does mainly what its title suggests - create a common space in which many different comments and texts can coexist. It is precisely its purity, however, that may make CommonSpace particularly attractive to colleagues in CUNY's many varied departments and programs. One can see instructors in fields other than English employing the program to advance the give and take that is so vital to writing. And one can imagine them comfortable in CommonSpace, creating assignments and opportunities for interaction natural to their disciplines, unencumbered by classroom materials written largely with writing teachers in mind.

The Office of Education, Training, and Staff Development will be conducting sessions this fall to familiarize writing faculty with CommonSpace (November 1 and December 6) led by Michael FitzGerald (Philosophy, Medger Evers) and myself. Registration is on a first-come-first-served basis, and registration material is available in provost offices or by calling Colette Wagner, Director of the Office of Training, Education and Staff Development, at (212) 541-0345. Follow-up workshops are being planned for the spring.

We know that faculty throughout CUNY have set their sights on high quality networked applications as they plan for the future. Faculty in English and throughout the disciplines would do well to consider CommonSpace's capabilities and decide whether they see a role for the application in that future. CommonSpace appears to be a technology application which can enhance the kind of collaborative exchange that enriches writing in any field.