Our efforts are guided by a commitment to ensuring technology serves to achieve genuine social wellbeing and progress, that it is shaped by and contributes to the common good. We pursue these aims principally through action research in collaboration with a growing number of individuals, including young people, teachers, administrators, parents, and community-serving organizations with similar concerns and aspirations.

History

LazosLearning was established in 2006 to extend the reach of educational materials developed by experienced organizations in social and economic development to a wider audience through online delivery. Over the next decade and a half, we helped some 5,000 diverse students from over 100 countries rigorously study materials aimed at raising their capacity to participate effectively in social action and contribute to discourses concerned with the betterment of society. Woven into these efforts was a learning process concerned with the question of how to use technology to extend and enrich education while adhering to sound pedagogical principles.

As the pace of technological innovation accelerated, we began to pay greater attention to the use of technology in education, both online and in the classroom. We noticed that despite recurring enthusiasm for various technologies to revitalize and enhance education, many efforts did not bear their promised fruit. Technology, we concluded, can be used to extend and enhance education, but only when the underlying pedagogy is well-founded and when technology is carefully selected and used in consonance with it. This led us to examine underlying assumptions about pedagogy and technology.

Education is not isolated from community life, and in recent years we have begun to consider the influence of rapidly evolving digital technologies on the wellbeing of young people, their families, schools, teachers, and local communities.