I’m really excited to announce a new undertaking that my good friend Bruce Dixon from Melbourne, Australia and I are launching today: Raising Modern Learners (RML).
As the proud owner of two teenagers (where’s the handbook?), I’ve been more and more drawn to the question of how we begin to educate parents around the very big learning and schooling shifts that are occurring because of the Web and the technologies that support it. Specifically, how can we develop and nurture in parents a new context for learning that will allow them to understand the changes many of us are fighting for in our classrooms. Neither Bruce nor I have seen any co-ordinated attempts to offer parents a truly different concept of schooling that synthesizes technological change with progressive ideas around learning and a new vision for the role of schools in our communities.
We’re hoping our free, weekly newsletter and accompanying site will begin that work.
We’ll be curating six themes a week dealing with topics like changes in higher ed, the future of work, learning with technology (and without) for all ages, new literacies, rethinking schools and classrooms, parenting around technology and much more. We hope our tagline, “Guiding our kids into their fast-changing futures” captures the gist of this work. Our aim is to be brief yet provocative, and to that end, one theme a week will be developed by a blog post that offers our personal slant on things. This week’s newsletter just went up. If you think it’s worthy, please subscribe, and then send the link to all of your friends. There will be badges for those with the most referrals. Maybe.
This is the start of what we’re hoping will be a growing effort to help in the work that classroom teachers, administrators, board members are doing to start conversations around change. I’ll keep you updated as we roll out new opportunities for parents (Hangouts, podcasts, etc.) and, importantly, for some other groups we think need some better contexts as well. (Guess who.) Stay tuned.
For now, your feedback and ideas for improvement are always welcomed. If you have articles that you think might be relevant, please let me know. Our Twitter handle is @modernlearners, and we’re working on other social sites as well. Please get in touch.
Most of all, thanks for your continued support over the years in this work. Bruce and I sincerely hope this helps all of our collective efforts.
~Will