Newer than the information below, and busy as of late 2010:
Facebook has lots of unschoolers (and their friends, relatives and old high school buddies) (the group I had linked is gone).Online Communities/Blogs/Art Sites...NINGS. One for radical unschoolers: Radical Unschoolers Network (and here's my page there: http://familyrun.ning.com/profile/SandraDodd)
[later note: I did like the name of the ning; it was limited in usefulness because of the way people chose who could see their posts, but it was busy for a while]
Jenny Cyphers wrote:
My daughter has been sitting at her computer for hours and hours and
hours everyday. While originally it was disturbing to me, I've since
changed my thinking.
. . . .
She's been playing Youtube. For those that don't know what that is, it
is an online video blog, somewhat like Myspace. She spends hours
looking up videos, pictures, and music, cataloging them in files. They
are all anime, some of them are tv shows, some you can only see through
Youtube because they haven't aired in the US. Our library has a very
scarse and limited supply of anime and manga. So, for her this is a
self made resource for the things she loves. Self made, meaning she
found this resource on her own and starting researching and cataloging
all the things that she had been trying to find elsewhere. (How cool
is that?!)
She has so many pictures now, that she is able to cut and paste them into video making programs easily, to string together stories of various characters and put music to it to showcase on her Youtube account for others to view and rate and enjoy. She's made all kinds of friends that regularly view and write to her Youtube account, just like a myspace, but with the added interest of anime.
To keep up with her interest in anime, she reads the books that correlate to the shows and practically memorizes them all. She is able to dissect each and every one of those books and shows and can tell you where they deviate from one another.
I can tell you this, there is no way I could keep up with what she is doing. She asks for help throughout the day for various things like uploaded something, spelling help, etc. Mostly she figures it out on her own. She's made video spoofs on other people's videos, she's made her own videos using our camera and recording odd little displays of neighbor children behavior and posted them, or sometimes threatened to post them as black mail to get her friends to behave nicer than what she's videotaped. Oddly enough this technique has worked well to get kids to stop fighting about something. She's so discreet that they never know that she is videotaping them. We've talked about rules and copyright laws and posting policies and all of that. She's knowledgeable.
Meanwhile while the neighbor kids are trying to keep up with what she's doing, they are incumbered by parents who won't help, or won't allow or won't do "whatever", so they come here and do whatever my daughter is doing. I'm not really doing anything except allowing her the freedom to do what she wants, everything else is all her. The worst thing I could do, is be her road block, which I thankfully recognized as being my road block, and got out of her way.
So for all parents who feel anxious about what their children are or aren't doing, the best thing to do is to do nothing and examine yourself until you feel confident to jump in and share the experience that your child will gladly share with you. The worst thing you can do is get in the way of that wonderful creative process blossoming right there in front of you that you may not even see. I learn something new everyday, even things that are soooo totally obvious, I look back and wonder why I ever saw it different!
Jenny (Jenstar)
OTHER PARTICULARS
ONE FOR ARTISTS:
http://resuki.deviantart.com Gina Trujillo's page, as a sample, and the main pageFor MUSICIANS:
MySpace, with http://www.myspace.com/halfmoonblessing Cameron's band's page, as a sample, and the main page is http://myspace.com/ *Lots of people who aren't musicians are there, but it's music-rich and music-friendly. Weird Al has a page: myspace.com/weirdalFor PHOTOGRAPHERS:Holly mentioned Pure Volume. I don't have a sample page.
flickr http://flickr.com/photos/radicalunschooling/207811458/Ren Allen's page, as a sample, and there's an unschooling group pool. The home page is easy to get to from those.
Plain old Blogs are below (ideas and samples)
BLOGS, plain old blogs
Usually finding one blog will lead you to others, especially if the blog is a member of a "blogring," which is a group with a link to go to other blogs in that group. Here's my unschooling blog, which is used just as a little family news site:
SandraDodd.blogspot.com
Another way to use a blog is as a collection. Some people have photos with a theme, or write editorials on a particular topic. I have one on clues in songs and such about what
"being in love" is. Pam Sorooshian has a collection of ideas about math for unschoolers: Joyful Math (gone, in 2023) Joyce Fetteroll has had a beautiful one with writing ideas: Dragon Writing Prompts
Pam's blog later: Learning Happens
Joyce Fetteroll's site: Joyfully Rejoycing—not "community," but a collection of "best of" writings by Joyce and others, from discussions over many years
There are some unschooling "communities" that people need to pay to join, with discussions that are hidden behind that pay wall. I'm not interested in promoting those.
More and more magazines and TV stations and such have blogs instead of regular webpages. There are advantages and disadvantages. You can often comment on blogs, and that can be cool.
Blogs gave way to twitter ["X"] and Instagram. Some people still use facebook.
[In 2024, reading this made me nostalgic for the days people read blogs and left comments. I guess facebook was easier. Someday I'll be nostalgic for facebook, I suppose.]
Online Safety
Language arts
Strewing
Dire Predictions
Parenting Considerations
sexual advice ideas
choices
the value of Yes