Bruce

Modern Learners co-founder Bruce Dixon has spent the bulk of his career developing programs that assist governments to make effective use of technology across their education sector. His strategic work has enabled governments to better manage large scale personal technology deployments, and ensure outcomes that drive both school improvement and ultimately transformation. Bruce is now retired and enjoying life with his family in his Melbourne, Australia home.

What Do We Mean By Dropout?

It’s interesting to reflect on how often we hear or use the word dropout and yet barely give a second thought to its meaning or more importantly what it implies. Along the way it has become a measure of school success or more notably school failure, and is used in a similar manner across higher ed. […]

What Do We Mean By Dropout? Read More »

Is Higher Ed Broken?

Who benefits most from the current model of higher education? While the existing model may have served post-secondary students well in times past, there is increasing evidence that we need to rethink the extent to which it is meeting the needs of today’s modern learners. For decades successive generations have accepted and built on what

Is Higher Ed Broken? Read More »

The Science of Transformation

Where does school improvement end and transformation really start?  I don’t know about you, but more and more I am hearing the terms used interchangeably, and if you throw in school reform the conversation can get very muddy. While reform is a term most often applied to ‘fix’ a school or school system that is

The Science of Transformation Read More »

The Era of Sanitized Computing

In recent times I have become quite intrigued by the impact assumptions have on the effectiveness of our decision making, and sadly our wonderful world of education, and in particular edtech is too often cluttered with a myriad of unfathomable assumptions on which poor decisions are made. As an example we could start with some

The Era of Sanitized Computing Read More »

How Bold is Your Vision?

It’s hard to think of many words that are more misused or abused in our schools than “vision,” and even if we discount the number of times it’s confused for mission, its role as the North Star too often seems to be trivialized if not by definition, then certainly by execution. Certainly the article Will

How Bold is Your Vision? Read More »

Knowing What You Need to Know

About two weeks ago, I ran a whole day workshop at a large, high-performing public elementary school.  We’d been working for most of the day around their plans to move to a modern learning environment, but as is typical of many schools their use of technology had really only played a marginal part in their

Knowing What You Need to Know Read More »

Captured in Context

About 5 years ago I worked with a small team to set up a research and development facility known as ideasLab in a Western suburb of Melbourne. It was an exciting project, built around answering a simple question: What’s now possible? The premise of the question followed a national initiative which meant that more than

Captured in Context Read More »

One Small Step…in Time

For all that we have written about the shifts we are starting to see in our schools, there are an increasing number of questions that need to be answered. Where do we start and what is the path or roadmap going to look like? There is plenty of discussion currently around ‘deep learning’, so is that

One Small Step…in Time Read More »

The Transformation Fantasy

As the year draws closer, I’ve been reflecting on which are the words we use  in education that we have managed to normalise, appropriate, or in some cases bastardize over the past twelve months.  No doubt ‘narrative’ has to be a big contender for a top 3 spot and it would all be very funny

The Transformation Fantasy Read More »

Babes in the Technology Woods

It’s a funny thing, but despite all the predictions and over-the horizon talk we continually hear around emerging technologies, I can’t recall any ‘futurists’ predicting the impact personal technology access is now having on our very young children. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with anticipating future trends per se, it’s just that we seem

Babes in the Technology Woods Read More »