Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education

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.

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 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.

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.)

Is it what you were thinking about?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351871

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353756

Don't have money to work on it, right now. :(

Things are early on still so if you wanted to pitch in, you could be a lot of help.

http://www.studentrevolt.com/

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.

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).

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.

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).

The most active class so far is MIT's OCW 6.00, Intro to Computer Science: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...

There are others learning Vim, SICP, bash, etc. I'm also experimenting with a guitar class.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the site. My goals when designing the site were exactly as you have described above.

http://smart.fm – a next generation learning platform from Japan featuring personalized learning techniques.

http://grockit.com – a social learning tool to help students prepare for SAT, GMAT, etc. With elements of a social game.