Ensemble is a multi-institutional effort to build a single online community that gives computing educators a way to share educational resources and collaborate with other teachers on projects. The project has been in the making for several years and it still undergoing heavy revisions to make it more useful and usable.

My goal with my master’s project is to create a social rewards system that will encourage teachers to contribute their resources and opinions for others to benefit from. The first phase of my project recently launched at SIGCSE 2011, which incorporates a collection of earnable roles (or simplified badge system) that users can unlock for performing positive actions on the site. My team also has plans to build a number of other features to support the health of the community at large.

In addition to the creation of the system itself, I am interested in the social analytic techniques that can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses in community participation. Another goal of the Ensemble Social Tools platform is to provide useful metrics for community participation in order to detect social shortcomings before they become major problems.