I have just signed up for Sophia and so far it’s pretty cool. What is Sophia? It’s a social learning network described as “a mashup of Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube focused solely on education”.

What happens on Sophia?

You create a profile, make friends, join groups and follow subjects. There is a points system for watching and participating in activities, including great class management points for ‘good behaviour’, it’s not called that but the idea is to encourage people to act responsibly on the site. There are lists of tutorials and you can make a ‘playlist’ from them.

You can watch a tutorial and give it a rank then work your way up to the next tutorial. You can also upload tutorials – big bonus, we can all SHARE.

Tutorials are media heavy: text, graphics, music, videos, slideshows … The idea is that people both learn and teach in different ways so the more tutorials the more ways there are for people to connect with a learning style that matches them best.

Sophia has taken off in a big way and rightly so, it looks like loads of fun & there is a lot of potential for use in wider educational settings. There are privacy settings so you can share with an invite only group of people. Class projects could pick out different things in tutorials or create their own tutorial for a much deeper learning experience, or you can simply share a tutorial with your online or physical students.

I hope they look at breaking down the subject divisions and adding more of a tag system as not all learning takes place within a subject header.

To top off this great site they emphasis  Creative Commons on their licensing agreement.

They want people to share and work together :).

Check it out here