Nichole Pinkard is an associate professor of learning sciences in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She is the founder of Digital Youth Network, co-founder of Inquirium LLC and Remix Learning, home of iRemix, a social learning platform that connects youth’s learning opportunities in school, home, and beyond. In collaboration with the Chicago Public Library, Dr. Pinkard helped found YOUmedia, a public learning space that immerses high school students in a context of traditional media – books – to make and produce new media artifacts like music, games, videos, and virtual worlds. Her current scholarly interests include the design and use of pedagogical-based social networks, new media literacy learning outcomes, ecological models of learning, digital badging, computational-making learning environments for underrepresented groups, and designing city-level learning ecologies. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, an M.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University.