The Plaza is the SoL Education Partnership’s online social network. This forum exists to support stakeholders in the SoL Education Partnership build and nurture self-sustaining learning communities as well as to aggregate, organize, analyze, and evaluate our growing body of work.  Go to the Plaza

In the Plaza, you can:

· Connect with friends and colleagues who share similar goals and interests

· Create a group around a topic, project or geographical site

· Share useful links, files, and other media

· Share curricular exemplars

· Share best practices

· Write public notes or send private messages

Before logging in, please feel free to download and look over the User Guide (coming soon) to learn more about online participatory media, the functionality of the The Plaza, and how it relates to the SoL Education Partnership’s four operating frameworks: Education for Sustainability, Organizational Learning, Systems Thinking, and Youth Engagement. Participatory media follows a similar logic to creating a regenerative commons, a topic that we will explore in our 2008 community gathering; the greater the participation on the part of each community member, the more valuable the resource. The great challenge of our online network will be to leverage the ideas we generate and refine here into tipping points that make a difference “on the ground” in our schools and our communities.

Remember, what happens here is completely user-powered and user-determined, so I encourage you to sign up, connect, and collaborate with each other by sharing stories, ideas, news, resources and best practices.

Let’s begin with a few open questions of specific importance to this emerging community:

· What opportunities does online participatory media afford us as both leaders and learners?

· What challenges?

· In what specific ways should The Plaza be utilized?

Lisa Amadeo, Jedd Wilcox (jedd.wilcox@gmail.com), and Leah Mayor, Program Manger at the Cloud Institute (leah@sustainabilityed.org) will all be on hand at the SoL Education Partnership Community Gathering and Core Course to help with Plaza-related and other inquiries. Feel free to email us with any questions or comments about The Plaza.

For your reference, you may download the Facilitator’s Guide from last year’s SoL Education Partnership Core Course here.