LearNations is a cross-cultural global communication program for youth aimed at enhancing their educational experience and at the same time bridging communities. Youth participants learn to use technology as a means to extend their learning and develop an interest in other cultures while learning more about issues that are important to them, their families and local communities. LearNations is a hands-on, project based learning approach to development.

Rather than begin with technology, LearNations starts with an understanding of social and economic issues in the participant’s environment. LearNations leverages technology to help research the problems, produce and disseminate educational material and implement solutions. Youth are the stakeholders of this project. They decide what topic is important to them, based on issues that matter the most to them in their community. These issues may include, but are not limited to:

LearNations gives each child a voice regardless of age, gender, social class, community, and background. The goal of LearNations is to deliver a participatory learning methodology for education that uses project-based applied learning with digital media and interactive learning technologies. Youth research and discuss a topic, selected by them, and then apply their learning to collaborate digitally with their international peers.

Based on project site and topic, student teams are created. Through the LearNations portal, youth communicate through threads, blogs, wikis and pictures to share information about their community and topic of interest. A global web-collaboration platform brings low bandwidth, live video, voice and data sharing to connect students and teachers. Final presentations will be recorded and posted to the LearNations portal for all program participants to review, share comments respectively and learn.