SESP Faculty

Nichole Denise Pinkard

Faculty Profile

Nichole Pinkard is the founder of Digital Youth Network and L3, a social learning platform that connects youth’s learning opportunities across the school, home, community, and beyond.

Through collaborations with city agencies Pinkard and DYN’s work has ignited new models for reimagining, visualizing, and documenting learning across spaces through the creation of existence proofs in urban contexts.

Pinkard received a 2010 Common Sense Media Award for Outstanding Commitment to Creativity and Youth, the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies, an NSF Early CAREER Fellowship. She earned her bachelor’s in computer science from Stanford University, a master’s in computer science from Northwestern, and her doctorate in learning sciences from Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. 

Her current scholarly interests include the design and use of pedagogical-based social networks and socio-technical systems to support community-level ecological models of learning.

Hear Pinkard, in her own words, describe the focus of her research over the past 15 years.  There is still much work to do as this video captured eight years ago is as true today as then!

Nichole Pinkard from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

Chicago City of Learning
Digital Youth Divas
Digital Youth Network

• 2016 – Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Commencement Speaker
• 2016 – Pahara-Aspen Education Fellowship Summer 2016 Cohort
• 2014 – Northwestern University Alumnae Association Merit Award
• 2013 – Edutopia, Big Thinker in Education
• 2010 – Common Sense Media Award for Outstanding Commitment to Creativity and Youth
• 2005 – Apple Distinguished Educator
• 2004 – Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies
• 2000 – National Science Foundation Early Career Award

Dissertation