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- Metacognition exercise
Why do you "do" peeragogy? What brought you here? Why do you keep coming back?
Paola: I believe it’s a good way to learn. Maybe it’s the best way. I think I wasn’t aware of that before joining the group. I have always been a self-learner, I have been working mostly alone. After I began working with the group, I understood that you grow working with a group. You achieve things that you aren’t able to achieve alone. I think there’s a growing awareness of the value of collaboration in every setting and environment. There are more and more learning communities everywhere in every place in the world that are also learning that are that doing things together and deciding things together is best way that you could be in this world! I think we are living in hard times so we need more and more the sense that we are not alone and that we cannot solve problems alone.
Maria: I don’t remember historically how I got here. Maybe through Joe; it was a person who brought me. But I am here for several reasons. First, for a very pragmatic reason. I have a peer-based movement, Natural Math, and I want to learn how to do that thing. I don’t see any Coursera courses for “beginning movement leaders”. So that’s what it is, learning how to do my thing. The second thing, I think this is the alignment of values, and I try to keep in touch with people like that. And it feels nice to be in touch with people who share your path. This sort of conversation isn’t going to happen that much where I am. Coming together to talk about what’s important in life.
Charlotte: That resonates with me. I’ve had a quite similar experience.
Laura: The values we share here don’t always exist where you are located professionally. It takes a lot of convincing. But here, everybody’s on board, and we don’t have to convince each other. You don’t have to work too hard to convince people and that’s nice. It can be hard work getting people involved actively all the time.
Dorotea: There are many collaborative projects that aim to do something of this kind, but they are not as much into it as we are in a sense. They notice something or promote something that we do also, but they do not pay attention to other things that we consider important. Some people have natural tendencies to be peeragogical, and some people are not so transparent in the way they do things, but I think it’s really beneficial, especially for collaborative projects. Everyone can learn a bit of that and do it if they bring more awareness to how they do things and what they think and not just focus on some part of it, but see things in a bigger picture in a sense, so I think people do it in little different ways and sometimes they do the opposite, but I think our role would be to bring more awareness to the details and process. And if people resonate with it they can say yes it makes sense and they can do it this way, but still I think it would help to focus attention on all that could be done in a peeragogical way, Bring more awareness to roles, would help to focus attention to all that could be done in a peeragogical way and maybe is not because there’s not enough awareness of the process. In general my answer is most people are able to do it, but maybe they just don’t know yet.
Ray: Since this is my first time attending one of these Hangouts, I am that new person who can provide an outside view. I have found that in terms of learning goals, most people my age have other people who set the goals for them, and have purely academic goals, whereas I have more experiential goals, and I want to learn things for experience or for personal fulfillment. I haven’t found a lot of resources about that. A lot of resources for self-directed learning are about going in and doing things by yourself. But I’m looking for better ways to organize social learning experiences. In the Peeragogy Handbook, there are some very concrete examples of people who have done projects in the vein of peeragogy. I would also like some more conclusions -- this is what we did, these are the values that worked, these are some of the more general steps.
Charlotte: Joe and I went through the Patterns paper recently, and looked at some things related to my work with the Independent Publishers of New England (IPNE). This sort of activity is really useful to do before we go to share that paper at the Pattern Languages of Programs conference. But, the main thing is that having Joe to go through it with me really helped a lot. The IPNE publishing group is now really starting to happen! I don’t even want to believe that it’s working because I’ve been so wounded and punished by the previous dysfunction, but now I ask people stuff, I validate their experience, I find things that they are really good at, and so on…! And it’s really working. It’s not that I have all the answers but something is just different. And, it’s good having Karen around; she lives nearby and the in-person connection is helpful.
Joe: You have achieved a lot recently so you’re justifiably happy about that.
Charlotte: Yeah, but it’s also me being mindful of what works in this sort of community. Rather than using a crowbar or a winch to get people to use a Hangout for example.
Doug: I got here because in 2012, Howard Rheingold threw down a gauntlet, and said let’s come together and figure something out. Let’s make a handbook on how to learn together. That continues to be a central question even now. Getting together in service of collaborating better, working toward something more sustainable than what we’ve been doing. The “storming” and “norming” drove me to look for fundamental ingredients that could be distilled, and ways we could help others do it more efficiently.
Laura: You said something last week that really stuck with me -- in fact, I decided to transcribe it:
"The learners and the learning community need to be part of, and they should be treated as the primary stakeholders in their learning experience. If in their learning journey there is a vehicle or device or mechanical element involved, they need to be part of the building of that, and in contributing to that and engaging with it and being involved in it, it reinforces the learning, of course, because every dimension of the learning, protocols, the modality, the tools, the mechanisms, the resources – all of those things factor into how much imprinting comes out the back-end. Different courses or learning communities will emerge with their own cultures and different affinities and centres of gravity, in terms of their comfort zones and preferences and aesthetics and values and how they relate to the material they are learning. Each year a whole new community arrives and that community is brand new – and that community doesn’t necessarily bear any resemblance to, or have any commonality of values, interest, or charge or load or engagement or pull, to the one from the year before -- because it is a completely different group of people."
Karen: One of the things I thought of, one of the things that keeps me here, is, well -- last week’s session went off on a tangent about educational policy in the States. It’s interesting -- I wasn’t actually sticking with the peeragogy concept at all -- and my point is that one of the things that keeps me here is the willingness from everyone to learn from each other. That’s a really unique thing. They all want to learn from each other. I know that I want to learn, and I know that I’m in a group that wants to learn. That’s very rewarding. Also I still feel like an immigrant in my own country, and working on a lot of projects at the same time. But it’s OK in this project, I’m with a bunch of people who are curious about learning in a group. In other groups, the willingness isn’t always there. I spend a lot of energy trying to communicate with other people, and a lot of the time is spent on ego-related things because you don’t want to step on other people’s goals. The main goal here -- learning -- really helps.
Charlotte: We have very few confrontations. I did get a little overheated if someone is being vague and I don’t see how what they’re saying applies. But yes in general there’s a willingness, and people feel welcome.
Joe: We’re open to dialog, and in the end even when we start out disagreeing, we end often end up saying “yes, I agree.”
Laura: And sometimes learning is letting someone else take the limelight, and just listening -- at those times I mainly want to draw on your expertise and experience.
Charlotte: And if you speak up about it then we all know what your experience is.
Joe: I can tell you, really succinctly, I keep coming back in hopes of the group upskilling; and, over the years we’ve been working together, I think there is evidence that we have done that.
Charlotte: Yes, we did quite a bit of work things like that around the Peeragogy Accelerator.
Karen: Self-awareness as a group is pretty cool. I’m late on the train with ‘mindfulness meditation’ but it is really interesting thinking about how important it is to become aware of what triggers you, so you can gain more control your own reactions to things. Doing that as a group is a really helpful thing. In these discussions we’re often thinking about what we need to be mindful of as a group.
Doug: There’s a profound level of programming, all of us have been subjected to in the industrial model. For example, the concept of time having to be productive, or collaborative activity being towards a concrete end. The truth of that model is people are related to as commodities and we’re productive machines. To get out of that programming, to unlearn it, the biggest learning and biggest revolution has been creating the space and time and letting the intangibles of a what a human being (as opposed to a human doing) is -- allowing that a whole lot more time and indulgence to surface and manifest. And Charlotte, I would be willing to bet you that the shift you’re experiencing with IPNE is a result of the shift in you being more open to the human beings, even if it as the expense of getting things done or being efficient.
Charlotte: It’s also what binds the community. We’re now using technology to bind the community and strengthen personal connections. But there were a contingent of people in IPNE who found email and then stopped and bogged down in that. So all their information is buried in their email or on their hard drive. Getting people to the sharing level has been working/happening. But you’re right -- a lot of the trouble and pathos has been my war against it.
Dilrukshi: I was first introduced to the peeragogy by a group of people I communicate in a MOOC - I think it was leaders of learners or Openlearn courses from Stanford. +Julia +Fabriccio and +Federico were the group that I engaged most in that and just after joining Peeragogy community, I felt so welcomed by a community which has the likeminded to my ideas and thoughts. It is the openness which encourage me to be connected.
Potential motivations
- Acquisition of training or support in a topic or field
- Building relationships with interesting people
- Finding professional opportunities through other participants
- Creating or bolstering a personal network
- More organized and rational thinking through dialog and debate
- Feedback about performance and understanding of the topic
- Acknowledgement and recognition from other people in the project
Potential roles in your peer-learning project
- Leader, or perhaps “Directly Responsible Individual”, Co-Leader
- Manager, Co-Manager Team Member, Worker
- Content Creator, Author, Content Processor, Reviewer, Editor
- Presentation Creator, Designer, Graphics, Applications
- Planner, Project Manager, Coordinator, Attendee, Participant
- Mediator, Moderator, Facilitator (of… teaching, onboarding, helping people be heard and participate, project management), Upskilling the group
- Proponent, Advocate, Representative, Contributor, Activist.
- Catalyst - throwing out ideas, if this makes sense to you as it does to me, then what will manifest?
- Librarian - salt things away and retrieve them from the archive
- Listener - an attentive, non-judgmental person who is able to tell you if what you said is really what you meant.
Potential contributions
- Create, Originate, Research, Aggregate, Document
- Develop, Design, Integrate, Refine, Convert, Make connections/Networker, Network-weaver in terms of seeing how systems weave together
- Write, Edit, Format
- Lowering barriers to participation, encouraging people to step up. People carry so much imprinted fear that it’s “not safe and not OK to not know”; help to change that.
We intend to revise and extend the patterns and methods of peeragogy to make it a workable model for learning, inside or outside of institutions.
If we sense that something needs to change about the project, that is a clue that we might need to record a new pattern, or revise our existing patterns.
We’ve converted our old pattern catalog from the Peeragogy Handbook into this paper, sharing it with a new community and gaining new perspectives. Can we repeat that for other things we’ve made?
Making it easy and fruitful for others to get involved is one of the best ways to redistribute the load. This often requires skill development among those involved; compare the pattern.
We need to build specific, tangible “what’s next” steps and connect them with concrete action. Use the Scrapbook to organize that process.
We have prototyped and deployed a visual “dashboard” that people can use to get involved with the ongoing work in the project. Let’s improve it, and match it with an improved interaction design for peeragogy.org.
Identifying and fostering new and new working groups is a task that can help make the community more robust. This is the time dimension of spin off projects described in Reduce, reuse, recycle.
A more detailed (but non-limiting) “How to Get Involved” walk-through or “DIY Toolkit” would be good to develop. We can start by listing some of the things we’re currently learning about.
After pruning back our pattern catalog, we want it to grow again: new patterns are needed. One strategy would be to “patternize” the rest of the Peeragogy Handbook.
To join us, please say hi! Sign up for our Google Group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/peeragogy and then write to us at: [email protected]
Or write to: Peeragogy Project c/o Pierce Press PO Box 206 Arlington, MA 02476. Join a Google Hangout at 18:00 GMT on Mondays - message us at https://plus.google.com/+PeeragogyOrgHandbook to get on the invite list.
We have lots of other opportunities for peers to contribute. See http://peeragogy.org for more.
Don’t worry too much about protocols or trying to catch up! Just jump in! :) “A Peeragogy Interview” © 2015 by the Peeragogy Project. All rights dedicated to the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Zero license. You can view the license online at https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.