Project Zero is a research organization based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We are thrilled to be collaborating with Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk to create an online learning community involving students from around the world, free of charge. Please click here to find out more about the background of the project.

We recently began a four-month pilot study involving middle and high school students from schools in Australia, Canada, India, the UK and the US. For the moment we are using Edmodo as our platform: it is the equivalent of Facebook but designed specifically for schools.

Here in a nutshell is how our study works:

1. Students post responses to sequenced weekly prompts that are related to Paul’s walk. We will be sharing these prompts and a selection of student responses in future blog posts.

2. Students read one another’s work and leave comments or questions for one another.

3. Students are invited to reflect on how their thinking about themselves, the world, and/or our collective human story has developed or changed as a result of learning about other students’ perspectives.

For the moment our learning community is private: we are experimenting with ways to create engaging and worthwhile experiences for students before we expand our reach. This blog will serve as a way of updating the wider world about what we are doing: we hope to spark interest in our project among educators and young people far and wide. In the fall we would like to welcome many more schools and students into our very special on-line community.