The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning

from the site:

This journal seeks to bring together an international community of scholars exploring the topic of unschooling and alternative learning, which espouses learner centered democratic approaches to learning. JUAL is also a space to reveal the limitations of mainstream schooling. JUAL understands learner centered democratic education as individuals deciding their own curriculum, and participating in the governance of their school-if they are in one. Some examples of learner centered democratic possibilities are unschooling, Sudbury Valley , Fairhaven , the Albany Free School , and the Beach School in Toronto. In terms of unschooling, we view it as a self-directed learning approach to learning. Free, open access Current issue

Archive

Hacking your Education

Hacking Higher Education: Dale Stephens and Unschooling

Forbes, March 18, 2013

Book review/article by Anthony Hennen.

Apprendre sans l'école, Interview in French

Lafamille Laferrière-Meloche wrote:

Voici une entrevue que j'ai donné sur notre quotidien d'unschoolers. La journaliste a simplement rapportée mes propos et son introduction est très positive!

Here's an interview I gave on our life unschoolers in french)! The introduction of the journalist is very positive! Apprendre sans l'école
http://ecoleurbania.ca/apprendre-sans-lecole/
Ne pas envoyer ses enfants à l'école. Certains le font, dont Stéphanie et Alain, et on a jasé avec eux.

Home, sweet school (Australian article)

Home, sweet school

Sydney Morning Herald, February 9, 2013
by Catherine Keenan

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/home-sweet-school-20130204-2dt7h.html

World of Warcraft in the classroom

Teamwork, interpersonals, vocabulary...

Teacher ditches books for video games AmericaNowNews.com

Part of the article:

Words like "quest," "guild," "story," and "epoch" comprise the game's key vocabulary.

"I didn't think language arts could be fun, but this actually makes it really fun," said Cheyenne, a student in the class.

Cheyenne is the only girl in the class, but she says the class is a team and the members are now her friends.

"Since I've been in here, we have been doing quests together and, in a way, getting to know each other better," she said.

http://www.americanownews.com/story/16954437/one-teacher-ditches-books-for-video-games

Unschooling truly in a class of its own

Unschooling truly in a class of its own

Andrew Taylor
Arts reporter, Canberra Times

Interview of Lauren Fisher, about her family in New South Wales, and some quotes from Beverley Paine and Penny Lewis.

---

Sandra Dodd comment: Either this is missing some context, or the professional he interviewed for balance (those professionals never know anything about unschooling) totally contradicted himself. It seems disjoint to me:

A senior lecturer in Monash University's Faculty of Education, Dr David Zyngier, does not support any form of home schooling because the vast majority of parents are not capable of teaching their children to read, write or be numerate.

"Children on their own without external intervention will never learn to read and write or do mathematics, the three most difficult things that any child will ever learn," he said.

"That is why we leave these things to well-educated professionals. That is why we no longer go to witch doctors for medical issues or try and fix our cars, fix faulty electrical systems ourselves."

Dr Zyngier said there is no robust evidence that unschooled children are capable of the same academic achievement as measured by year 12 results. Unschooling has laudable aims, but Dr Zyngier said "powerful learning like these approaches need to be offered in all schools to all children". "But such learning approaches if taking place outside of the school will only be possible in middle-class families," he said.

Very many people can repair their own cars and do minor electrical repairs. I wish journalists didn't feel that it created balance to embarrass a professor or psychologist that way. Nearly every article gets some "professional" to embarrass himself or herself that way.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/education/unschooling-truly-in-a-class-of-its-own-20130122-2d59r.html

Film about alternative education

This is a film about a film.  The artists would like help, and you can benefit!

Said The Blind Man
A unique and delinquent teenager finds a proper outlet for his creativity and a sense of belonging in an alternative education system.

Gamers and VERY fine motor skills

Gamers Are Better at Robotic Surgery Than Med Students Smithosonia's blog report: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2012/12/gamers-are-better-at-robotic-surgery-than-med-students

Robotic surgery—commanding a robotic arm to perform delicate surgical tasks—has become more and more popular in medicine. But are doctors really the best ones to be commanding them? Turns out that gamers might actually be a better bet. ...

Alternative to university

5 reasons to replace college with travel and self-directed learning


Blake Boles, of BlakeBoles.com

Ethiopian village children figure out tablet PCs.

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction
It goes on, but here's the beginning, and it's pretty exciting:

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!"
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

It reminds me of the Indian experiment some years back, but in India English is spoken all around, and there's printed word all over the place. Hole in the Wall
This article has photos of computers and kids in India: Using computers to teach children with no teachers Interestingly, the articles are still talking about "teaching" instead of learning. :-) They aren't "learning by teaching themselves." They're learning. Period.