Monthly Wrap: December 2018 by Charlie
Late last month some peers and I had a “Holidaze” peeragogy meeting. As you may already know, peeragogy is “active learning together with others”, put another way it’s a term to describe “what people use to produce and apply knowledge together”. After checking-in on our various life happenings we chatted educational ideas, looked into the past on what we’ve done, and peered into the 2019 future: defining goals for beginning of this year.
Some of the topics under discussion included quality circles: “a participatory management technique that enlists the help of employees in solving problems related to their own jobs”, which someone revealed are a component of kaizen “activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers”. Such empowered employees could stop the assembly line at an auto plant if they found a defect, which was cheaper than fixing the car after it was made. They have also been used in education:
“Students’ Quality Circle … can be understood simply as: a small team of self motivated and proactive students with a common purpose working together; to identify recurring problems, analyze their root causes and solve them permanently leading to continuous improvements”.
This led to a discussion of this being a form of distributed leadership which differs from traditional leadership with a special individual in charge who dictates followers what they’re supposed to do, which led to someone citing adaptive leadership:
A “complementary approach to leadership based on a polyarchic assumption (i.e. leadership of the many by the many), rather than based on an oligarchic assumption (i.e. leadership of the many by the few). Leadership in this theory is seen as a complex dynamic involving all, rather than only a role or attribute within a hierarchy.”
We also touched on Ishikawa (or fishbone) diagrams, Monsters University, women in science, and rowing.
Discussing how rowers build up muscles slowly over time and then how eventually those small improvements compound together into drastic changes in rowing ability, we decided to start rebuilding our peeragogical muscles. We remember how strong we became in past years putting out 3 editions of the handbook (3rd Ed. in HTML, PDF, and print) and to start on the path back to that writing strength our first quarter, goals are for each peer to:
- Write a blog post (no more than three paragraphs) on a learning topic they find interesting and relate it to peeragogy,
- And/or if you don’t have time to write, you can proofread,
- Meet again in March to share work and outline next steps, and
- Keep in touch via our public email group.
These blog posts will be skeletons for mini versions of the handbook on specific topics. For example, one could be on quality circles or adaptive leadership. The idea is to uncover peeragogy hidden in plain sight in all sorts of situations: the way quality circles encourage enlisting help from fellow employees to solve problems is a way of producing knowledge with peers (or peeragogy). There were suggestions to publish the posts on Medium, LinkedIn, Google+, PubPub, and more. Without dismissing any possibilities, we decided it did not matter where they were shared. We can write anywhere and then move things across different platforms, each of which has its own opportunity to make connections (which may be a new learning pattern). If you are interested in joining, please get in touch with us!
- Public Google Group email: [email protected]
- Private email: [email protected]
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/peeragogy
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peeragogy
- GitHub: https://github.com/Peeragogy
Original text by Charlie Danoff dedicated to the Public Domain, as specified below.
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