There is growing evidence that knowledge workers increasingly depend on personal dispositions such as orientations, values, and attitudes (Erpenbeck & Heyse 1999) to act successfully in areas of challenge that do not allow for the mere application of previously acquired factual knowledge and procedural skills. In the research and development project iCamp we start from the assumption that domain specific teaching in formal Higher Education can be meaningfully re-organised to construct authentic, challenging settings that allow for the advancement of competencies in the area of self-directing and self-organising of intentional learning projects, collaborating, and social-networking in cross-national, distributed and technologically mediated environments. To achieve this we provide descriptions of educational design and intervention possibilities in combination with an appropriate portfolio of tools that fall mainly under the category of social software. Evidence is collected in a series of in situ trials and first results will be discussed in this paper