Years ago, my husband started cracking up in front of the computer. At night, our television was off, the house was quiet, and while my son slept and I studied, my husband sat alone at his computer and laughed.

But he wasn't alone. Or was he? When you have instantaneous access to people around the world that share an interest in politics, history, art, music, literature and discourse, aloneness becomes an artifact of a simpler time. What my husband was doing was connecting by way of an online social network. When I sat in my study and heard him laugh a few rooms away, I had the distinct sense I was missing the party -- even though his body was the only one in the room.

These are things Howard Rheingold (Tools for Thought, 1985; Virtual Reality, 1991; The Virtual Community, 1993) understood as far back as 1985 when he became involved in the Well, a computer conferencing system. Anyone who asks searching questions about virtual networks will eventually end up reading Rheingold's work, so when I needed to understand this parade of virtual friends that became part of my husband's daily conversation, it was Rheingold's chapter on real-time tribes that helped bring the weird factor back down to earth. The sheer humanity of his approach to virtual networks is what made him stand out in a crowd of people who tended to focus on the technology.

During the past two decades, Howard Rheingold has become an iconic fixture in the virtual community sphere, a point of interest that reaches above and beyond (and well before) the Myspace and Facebook phenomena. In 2002, Rheingold published Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the "always-on era." In many of the articles written about Smart Mobs, writers quote Rheingold's description of the "thumb tribes," people who text message each other at break-neck speed to create collective action on a moment's notice.

These text-messaging, laptop-toting tribal members aren't necessarily sophisticated consumers of social media, though, an observation Rheingold made when he began encountering them in classrooms at University of California-Berkeley and Stanford. "I assumed they were Millenials," says Rheingold, describing the plugged-in 20-somethings we assume are always a technological step ahead. But students drew blank looks when Rheingold asked them to use blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and other social media tools in class.

This would have to change.

"Originally, I wanted to create a social media classroom that would provide an on-ramp to Web 2.0 tools," says Rheingold. "Yes, they can IM and they're inseparable from their lap tops and cell phones, but when it comes to wikis, blogs, RSS feeds for organizing their research, social bookmarking-these are things they need to be taught."

Point made. When we think about the ability to produce and consume information, we need to follow the text. Today, that means following the words to the immensely popular read/write/web world of social media. Unfortunately, bringing Web 2.0 tools into the classroom can be an agonizing experience for educators and a disorienting one for students. Too easily, students can spend much of their time trying to learn how to work the tools, and for educators with a low geek-factor, the learning curve cuts too deeply into the syllabus.

Rheingold hopes to change this with his newly launched Social Media Classroom. As a HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media & Learning competition winner in 2007, Rheingold set out to create what could well be a game-changer for participatory learning and the evolving frontier of digital-friendly pedagogy.

But before discussing his Social Media Classroom, Rheingold poses a few of society's hottest digital questions: "Do these different social media tools help the way we think? Are they beneficial or destructive to our social relationships? Do they increase or drain away social capital from our societies?" These tools, unfortunately, do not offer black-and-white answers, and Rheingold's answer to his own questions is, "It depends."

A few months ago, Rheingold led a forum over at HASTAC.org, where students and scholars discussed participatory learning. One of the most striking threads of the forum was the emphasis on physical characteristics of face-to-face learning. Close the laptops! Move the desks to create a circle! Promote eye contact between students! It may come as a surprise that an early adopter like Rheingold has reservations about the latest technology. "Better tools do not by themselves make for better pedagogy," he says in one of his video blogs. A critical eye for the tools, a deep understanding of the potential, and a focus on teaching make Rheingold poised to change the way we practice and discuss Education 2.0.

So what does make for better learning? One of the larger objectives of Rheingold's Social Media Classroom is to create a community of practice for those who want to discuss participatory media and best practices, among other topics. Only a few hours after the official launch of Social Media Classroom, the community forum was populated with dozens and dozens of people. This should be no surprise -- Howard has more than 4,000 people following him on Twitter, over 3,000 subscribing to his Smart Mobs blog, and over 1,600 friends on Facebook.

Over the next few weeks, months, and years, this community of practice will grow knowledge through Social Media Classroom's connected hub of participatory learning. They will engage students in forums, wikis, chats, blogs, microblogging, commenting, video sharing, social bookmarking, and RSS feeds. In Rheingold's words, they will "support a movement away from education as delivery of knowledge toward education as critical, collaborative inquiry -- a student-centric pedagogy that engages students in actively constructing knowledge together, rather than passively absorbing it from texts, lectures, and discussions."

Given that Social Media Classroom is free (as in free free), open-source (Drupal-based and built by the talented Sam Rose), and public, it will only be a matter of time before it becomes a cornerstone of Education 2.0. Cleverly, it is not intended to compete with content management systems such as Blackboard, Moodle and Sakai. Rheingold's Social Media Classroom can supplement these systems, offering a more sophisticated connecting hub where students can co-mingle participatory learning and social media. As Rheingold has so diligently observed, social affordances are key to creating a vibrant community. If the tools are awkward, dispersed, clumsy and confusing, the online space will be a ghost town, uninhabited and uninspiring.

Social Media Classroom offers those social affordances and something even better. Soon, Rheingold plans to have a hosted server for educators, so teachers can download Social Media Classroom and avoid the all-too-common bureaucratic IT obstacles that hold educators back from using innovative tools.

If you are an educator, or know someone interested in social media, spread the word. And follow the trail of other early adopters to http://socialmediaclassroom.com. They are there waiting for you.

To watch Howard Rheingold's video introducing Social Media Classroom, click here.