I’ve just joined the Social Media Classroom, a project initiated by Howard Rheingold and funded through a HASTAC award, provided by the MacArthur Foundation. This project seeks to empower and support learners and educators via new means of communicating, interacting and collaborating, and which emphasises the importance of “participatory pedagogy.”From the website:“The Social Media Classroom…includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMC materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don’t want to install your own.”Having only just gained access to the community area, there is much I still have to explore; and yet I cannot help but be inspired and empowered by the opportunities and mission this project seeks to promote.“…we’re launching an instance of the Colab as a community of practice for learners and teachers, educators, administrators, funders, students of pedagogy and technology design, engaged students who share a common interest in using social media to afford a more student-centric, constructivist, collaborative, inquiry-oriented learning. “If you are interested in the educational possibilities afforded by recent innovation in social media, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the Social Media Classroom. Near as I can tell the project only just recently launched and is looking to bring more forward-thinking educators together for the purposes of exploring and discussing the learning opportunities ...