Hello!<p>I'm thinking of an idea of a social networking education website. Many online educational projects such as Youtube EDU, iTunes U or Academic Earth have great content but lack social networking features. I believe the "social" part is very important in the process of learning things when you can interact with classmates and instructors, ask questions and get answers. So that not only you can browse and watch education materials, but also the community will play an important role in the learning process.<p>Do you know any websites that already offer these features?<p>There are good examples of the execution of this idea for particular areas like italki.com for english learning or www.jamplay.com for guitar playing. But I'm thinking bigger, so it'd be for fundamental university disciplines like computer science or mathematics.<p>I don't want to build another useless social network, I'm more on the way to research what is already available, how existent solutions can be enhanced.
Do you think of learning management systems (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learning_management_systems" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learning_management_sys...</a>), or do you think about it being open to all?<p>I know some of those systems has the option for fora, and my experiences with those has just been good. If you're looking for good ways to work with an open-for-all system, I suggest looking at the most used fora in e.g. mathematics and physics, and then take some ideas from there.<p>A problem I suppose you might encounter is that most schoolkids use this networking site just to solve their homework: At least that's what they do now. If you could somehow change that problem into a way of making them interested in learning how one solve those problems (instead of making other solve them), then you've got a great idea.
I've been thinking about this in terms of my own (7-year-old) educational website: <a href="http://eMusicTheory.com" rel="nofollow">http://eMusicTheory.com</a> -- interactive online drills for music theory students/teachers.<p>The entire experience would be much more interesting for students if they could compete with friends (like with apps on facebook, for example), but I'm not sure making yet another FB app is a good idea here, plus you'd be stuck competing with other music theory students.<p>My half-baked idea is a central educational social networking site in which you could earn education points by achieving scores on lots of different member sites, not just mine... so a music theory whizkid might use their stats/achievements/reputation/karma/whatever to compete with their math nerd friend, even though they're focusing on entirely different specialties. There'd have to be rough equivalency in the effort involved to achieve points on different sites, but that's not a big hurdle (and weighting could be adjusted automatically based on students' relative speed of advancement.. if students tend to go tearing through achievements on a given site, the value of its points would be reduced in the global stats).<p>I'll dig through some of the sites linked above when I have time, but at the moment nothing seems to match up with this concept.<p>Is this a good idea? (Is there anything out there heading in this direction? I don't have the time to develop it myself currently, though I'd happily offer tons of advice).
It's worth looking at what OpenCourseWare are doing, as well as university-centric networks like the British Open University's OpenLearn.<p>I co-founded an educational social network called Elgg.net in 2004 (which later became Eduspaces.net when Elgg's scope grew from education into an open source social networking platform for all), and I've been watching this space carefully. There have been quite a few services which have been and gone that have followed the model you've outlined, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to build something that works.<p>The biggest deal, in my opinion, is always this: find a way to make it work for the first user. Build it around existing educational resources, or tools for an individual to learn, and then let the community enhance that initial offering. Otherwise you've got one hell of an uphill battle ahead of you. (Pertinent examples include Flickr and Delicious which both allow you to store and share resources, but are so much more when millions of people are also participating.)
I've built a website to do that! It's called Curious Reef <a href="http://curiousreef.com/" rel="nofollow">http://curiousreef.com/</a> and I launched it a few months ago. People have been steadily learning a variety of subjects together since then.<p>The most active class so far is MIT's OCW 6.00, Intro to Computer Science: <a href="http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduction/" rel="nofollow">http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...</a><p>There are others learning Vim, SICP, bash, etc. I'm also experimenting with a guitar class.<p>I'd love to hear your thoughts on the site. My goals when designing the site were exactly as you have described above.
I'm leading a project doing exactly this, building an open source social learning platform on Drupal. You can check it out at <a href="http://eduglu.com" rel="nofollow">http://eduglu.com</a>. I made my second release yesterday - <a href="http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2010/06/01/second-release-eduglu" rel="nofollow">http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2010/06/01/second-release-e...</a><p>Things are early on still so if you wanted to pitch in, you could be a lot of help.
Thank everyone for participation. Did some more research and found out two interesting projects:<p><a href="http://smart.fm" rel="nofollow">http://smart.fm</a> – a next generation learning platform from Japan featuring personalized learning techniques.<p><a href="http://grockit.com" rel="nofollow">http://grockit.com</a> – a social learning tool to help students prepare for SAT, GMAT, etc. With elements of a social game.
I thought about this too, wrote about this a little bit here. Social Network was just one aspect of my idea.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351871" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351871</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353756" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353756</a><p>Don't have money to work on it, right now. :(
We just released Student Revolt which adds a social network to existing courses. You can see a screencast of how it works on the home page.<p><a href="http://www.studentrevolt.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.studentrevolt.com/</a>
In France we have beebac, it's a great website, very useful. (url : <a href="http://www.beebac.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.beebac.com</a>). I'm not sure about the US-friendly educational social networks..