User Profile

Professor, Northwestern University

Nichole Pinkard is director of the School of Design and an associate professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University in Chicago. 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, Nichole helped establish 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. Nichole is the recipient of a 2014 Northwestern Alumni Award, a 2010 Common Sense Media Award for Outstanding Commitment to Creativity and Youth, the 2004 Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies, an NSF Early CAREER Fellowship, and a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for research on how digital media affects literacy. She holds a BS in computer science from Stanford University, an MS in computer science, and a PhD in learning sciences from Northwestern University. Her current scholarly interests include the design of equitable learning ecosystems, use of pedagogical-based social learning networks, computational-making and new media literacy learning environments, digital badging, and computational-making learning environments for underrepresented groups. She is a Fellow of the 15th class of the Pahara - Aspen Education Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.