Work in Progress-Learning Enabled Social Network. In Frontiers in Education Conference

The learning enabled social network seeks to discover how to harness the power of social networking to enhance learning and promote the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines. Through student-driven, communities of learning, we hope to engage students in authentic problem solving and be accountable to each other for their work. Teachers will participate in the community as equal partners with the students. Assessments will be performance based and post facto using traditional methods, like written exams, outside the environment. Log data will be examined in an effort to link student paths with performance. A pilot study conducted this fall with communities of professional engineers, teachers, college engineering students, and high school science students will investigate how sustainable energy can be provided to various regions of the world. The outcomes of this study will inform future designs with the ultimate goal of creating an online environment capable mediating the formation of learning communities based solely on studentpsilas interest and need.