buddy press website

Xijen College of Mountain Province has setup  ”Buddy Press” on the college’s official website (www.xijen.com).  BuddyPress is a social network application that can be embedded in a website.  School sites tend to be sources of information on courses offered, school activitities and final grades.   School sites tend to be straightforward and offer less interactivity.  BuddyPress will try to change this.  As mentioned in its website, www.buddypress.org : 

“BuddyPress is built to bring people together. It works well to enable people with similar interests to connect and communicate. Some of the fantastic uses might be:

• A campus wide social network for your university, school or college.
• An internal communication tool for your company.”

With this in mind, students of Xijen College who are familiar with Facebook can find a new social network service to explore-right on the college’s website.  The school administration will encourage teachers to use Buddy Press as an extension of their classes.  In Buddy Press, groups can be formed where discussions and working on projects, assignments can be done.   The application will also hope to encourage a more comprehensive interaction between groups or students and teachers.  Several support application have been integrated in Buddy Press and this includes a “like” button similar to Facebook’s, a photo album generator, documents/file sharing and more.

In the pages of BuddyPress.org, the site describes how New York Universityuses the application:

“The Academic Commons of The City University of New York is designed to support faculty initiatives and build community through the use of technology in teaching and learning.  The free exchange of knowledge among colleagues across the university is central to better educating the student body and expanding professional development opportunities for faculty research and teaching.

The site is found at http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/.”