Peeragogy Monthly Wrap: 2020-05

Mixtape

Portugal. The Man – Feel It Still

“Peeragogy Monthly Wrap” Working Group Meeting Wrap

“Peeragogy Monthly Wrap” Working Group Meeting Wrap: 2020-05-06

Wish list for how people could support for wrap:

Share with course: where are problems / pain points?

Get people’s input into wrap itself earlier in month

Add multiple perspectives on the answer to the “what’s happening” question (coming to concensus sometimes leads to lack of diversity)

Have a Peeragogical Action Review specific repository?

Make it easier for people to contribute

Make it more of a data project, like mix tape, so new entries can flow automatically into the wrap for the month?

Similar to pattern repository?

Future:

Procedure guides for how people can write and contribute technically

Source people who get involved

People writing wraps at other places from where we source them together

Put it somewhere else? Who do we want to read this? Be aware of these practices?

Archive.org - a leader of it (Carl Malamud) is also a player in open knowledge scene

Maybe just send someone who we want to read this an email

Distribution

Add RSS to wrap (using Hypothes.is).

“Peeragogy Monthly Wrap” Working Group Meeting Wrap: 2020-05-20

Patterns

Create template and repository for patterns

Pattern template could be used to create cards, games, a catalog, etc.

Scenario: at an unconference, you could introduce patterns as a tool (not that they necessarily need to be used, more of a toolbox to choose from)

Make it easier to apply them, like a pattern practice

Universal tools that can be used on all kinds of patterns

PAR itself should be a pattern

Why do you need patterns? Answer: They should be used/applied. Patterns for architecture exist for being used in the field (for planning and constructing buildings). Other patterns, for example some textile coloring patterns, may only serve the purpose of being nice to look at.

Roadmap

General roadmap tool that could be in its own repository so you could see the current situation and future directions

Every two months a reminder to see if roadmap is outdated?

Or offering it for mapping if a project doesn’t have a roadmap?

If you don’t have a methodological or tool way to do this, it’s down to discpline and harder within unstrucutured peer learning scenario

PAR

PAR should have a naming convention so you could have more than one in a month and software would be able to organize them. PARs could flow automatically into wrap. Same with mixtape.

“Peeragogy Monthly Wrap” Working Group Meeting Wrap: 2020-05-27

How does it make sense for everyone to have their own corona research?

How can we hope to cure cancer? We don’t have tools.

Actionism – what happens when people lose interest following an initial excitement about a project?

Writing up patterns is nice, but how are we using them? What software is using/supporting/implementing them?

Common to create solutions or software but then not openly licensed or behind a pay wall – may provide some advantages to the founders, but how can that help wider community? Is that a bad thing that interest of owners or founders diverge from community? Good thing? Inevitable? What are other approaches?

Made me think of this paper on modular politics: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c4vp4HQFYHNsFzm4rNo2uh4fU8Gonfu9nJOLpasel5I

Blog post I mentioned that I wrote: https://www.foresee.com/blog/retail-trends-and-recommendations-on-our-way-to-the-next-normal

This is a draft in progress of our April activities!

Peeragogy Monthly Wrap: 2020-04

Course

We started semester two of the course!

Ideas discussed

https://www.codingrights.org/crtlz-ai-zine-fair-barcelona/

http://gregbloom.org/2020/03/31/something-is-not-necessarily-better-than-nothing-introducing-the-principles-of-equitable-disaster-response/

https://en.unesco.org/news/launch-unesco-dynamic-coalition-open-education-resources-oer

Mixtape

Rick Astley – “Kunsthaus”: Farbe ist meine Welt

Peeragogy Monthly Wrap: 2020-03

Introduction

30 April 2020 – CHICAGOLAND – Being here at the end of April and looking back to what we were doing at the beginning of March feels like a lot more than just a month has passed. We have all learned a lot since then including about doing things together online (video chats, watch parties, sharing methods for making masks, telehealth, etc.), how to adjust our day to day lives, and more about COVID-19 itself plus how to approach its myriad challenges.

Please stay safe and healthy, dear reader.

Another thing that happened in March was the vernal equinox, also known as, the end of winter. With that behind us, on this lovely Thursday, April 30th all of us involved with peeragogy wish you a happy Spring, National Poetry Month, and happy International Dance Day!

In case this is your first time hearing about peeragogy, it is a “a flexible framework of techniques for peer learning and peer knowledge production.”

We are going to close out the intro with a Peeragogical Action Review, or PAR. We are using this tool to go over what we learned and determine if any adjustments are necessary for our upcoming work.

PAR

Review the intention: what do we expect to learn or make together?

Finish the initial version of the peeragogy course

Make progress on version 4 of the handbook

Work on a paper to submit

Share our ideas and methods with others

See if there are ways we can help or support others in time of COVID-19

Establish what is happening: what and how are we learning?

We made progress on sharing and writing

The course was completed!

We got involved with some interesting COVID-19 projects

What are some different perspectives on what’s happening?

I had fun, learned a lot, and was excited to complete the first course!

What do you think of what we did, dear reader?

What did we learn or change?

Learned about how to run a course from start to finish

Watched how other groups of peers came together rapidly to produce some neat, timely, and helpful things for their fellow humans, including the Coronavirus Tech Handbook and shared medical supply designs.

What did we do in March?

Paper

We formally started working on a submission for the “Call for Papers for a Special Issue from the 3rd International Conference on Anticipation”. Anticipation and future studies have been something we’ve been actively discussing since the Oslo conference. Right now it may feel like our ability to see what may be coming in the future is not at its best.

We are planning to think about our work on patterns and how they could intersect with anticipation studies to give us better ways of preparing for possible futures.

Handbook Writing and Web Version

Writing out patterns is one thing. Putting them into practice and refining their use in your own work is a whole additional challenge!

We have been meaning to for some time to fine-tune how we implement the Newcomer pattern designed to make our work as accessible, as possible for people coming to it for the first time. A few years ago we created a quickstart guide to help, but it had gotten out of date. Thankfully, last month, Joe Corneli vastly improved the guide, as you can see in this picture.

What do you think, dear reader? Is that helpful for you to figure out how to join us in the middle of the river as we are swimming down it together on our way to (hopefully) understand peer learning and peer production better?

In addition, the Monday work session was used by peers to work on writing version 4 of the handbook.

Coronavirus Tech Handbook

Identifying instances of peeragogy “in the wild” is important for us to learn from other groups of peers around the world as they work to get things done. It helps us better define what peeragogy is and to learn things we can use to improve our own work. One of the most impressive examples I have ever seen is the work being done by the volunteer librarians on the Coronavirus Tech Handbook.

Certainly a handbook created by peers is something near and dear to our hearts as we have made a handbook of our own and are working on the next one! This group has taken it to a scale that we have not yet achieved in our years of work, and they have done it in weeks. On March 10th Newspeak House tweeted that they were starting a handbook full of resources for people across all sorts of groups to learn how they could respond to things in our coronavirus world. This was built off prior work they did with the UK Election Handbook. I (Charlie Danoff) got involved directly following a Facebook message Charlotte Pierce shared where they were looking for volunteers. I was not the only one, and soon they had over thousands of people a day viewing their Google Doc and a certain portion also editing. In an interview with Tech.London Nathan Young shared how “It turns out that Google Docs doesn’t particularly like 20,000 people viewing one document. So one of our technologists built something new in three days.” JoeDocs is now what powers the thousands of views and edits the handbook receives.

MetaCAugs

Another breed of “in the wild” peeragogy is seen weekly when Roland Legrand brings folks together in his MetaCAugs group to discuss cool new ideas and learn from one another. In our January wrap I shared details about how his reading group went through the third edition of the handbook. They are now talking a lot about future studies and other interesting topics! This video of their March 24th meeting is a great example of peeragogy in action!

On the 31st, Roland let Joe take the metaphorical mic and throw a peeragogy party! Check out the notes to read about how it went! :)

Course Sessions in March

In February we piloted a course on peeragogy. The idea of the course is: teach new peers about what we are doing. One way to think of it to help people who want to learn how to cut hair and go to beauty school, then exit as professional hairdressers ready to work in a beauty salon or barber shop. In our scenario they would be ready to start their own peeragogical projects!

In last month’s e-zine issue you can find links to videos and details about the February sessions.

March 5th

Video recording

We spent a lot of this session working on our paper for the anticipation conference as you can see in the Peeragogical Action Review I wrote afterwards. I revised the original slightly to correct grammar and spelling mistakes.

Review the intention: what do we expect to learn or make together?

We wanted to keep learning peeragogy as part of the course and to work on the paper

Establish what is happening: what and how are we learning?

We talked about the paper, our successes and failures and causal layered analysis. We took lots of good notes about these discussions on the Google doc.

What are some different perspectives on what’s happening?

I felt like it was a productive session!

What did we learn or change?

We changed the paper we learned about Causal Layered Analysis.

What else should we change going forward?

Incorporate all the comments and ideas into the next version of the paper. Also some of us need to do our homework before the next class on Thursday the 12th (including me!)

March 12th

On the 12th, I presented about the Modular Politics Paper by Primavera De Filippi, Seth Frey, Nathan Schneider and Joshua Tan that was recommended by Paola Ricaurte.

Some of the ideas we discussed were:

What the authors are describing is a software for governance

Different pieces that fit, and what you use can feed back into the main repository of tools for governance and allow for more nuanced ways to do things.

Peer production communities are impoverished in terms of governance

And the paper authors came up with ideas of a solution: flexible participatory regimes!

We then talked about the modular nature of the Co-operative College:

In Co-Op U, they will be 1 organization, and there will be organizations 2 and 3 online, which they would like to generate units or modules about how you can work together online, and these can be shared. Students will be able to pick their route, and involve modules that will be studied at different parts of the overall organization.

Lines of communication open between Co-op U (e.g., nature of work changed over 100 years, with subtext of getting people working together online) and Peeragogy (with an overlapping theme)

It’s also a co-operative community of co-operatives, since all of the orgs involved are educational co-operatives. But bring them together within a wider co-operative. However, this kind of model cuts across the student/regulatory organizations. The Office of Students is a regulatory body that regulates who can get degrees. You have to go through several years before you have a federated model.

Tried to connect the paper to our work

The image is what they’re trying to do with cooperative university → We might be organization 1 or organization 3 → The way that we want to work is generating units.

Talking about the intersections of modules led back into discussing our previous work on the handbook and different ways for groups to work together across organizations.

Handbook 1.0, it was just the handbook, by version 2 and 3 it was a complement to the accelerator.

It was also a book about how to make a book.

Getting participants to make a commitment to get involved or discuss – e.g. an issue in a learning or production environment. Do we have enough people? Could we get together and apply our brain power no matter what the background is?

A device for connecting different modules ⇒ reminder email.

For the next iteration of the course, we could include the Accelerator in some way and have that be part of the curriculum. That would get more buy-in with people, helping people with their projects.

We should return to the Primavera paper and think about how we can apply it to the accelerator

March 20th

Due to multiple factors, our session was pushed from our usual Thursday to a Friday and then we only met for a few minutes.

March 26th

Video recording

In the final pilot course session, Joe presented about the book “Designing Social Systems in a Changing World” by Bela H. Banathy.

Some interesting nuggets were:

Developing a systems view of education the systems-model approach: “First, the book aims at guiding the reader to understand what systems design is, how it works, why we need it. The second purpose is to develop an appreciation of the power we can gain by acquiring ever-unfolding competence in system design.”

Change: “Before we engage in the design of our lives and our systems, we need to reflect on how we ourselves relate to change.” “The future depends more ‘on what we do between now and then than it does on what has happened until now.’”

Bridge’s transition: We have to let go of the old reality, the old setting, the old thinking. The first step is “letting go,” leaving behind and transcending. The second step is envisioning what should become… which happens in a “neutral zone” of creativity, renewal, and design.

Then comes the third step: the transition into the new reality (transformation by design).

“We can say that EDUCATION AND THE SOCIETY ARE IN A CO-EVOLUTIONARY RELATIONSHIP.”

“The education we offer reflects perceptions and practices based on the societal image of the industrial age.”

“On the other hand, when a new image leads socio-cultural evolution, it can exert – as Polak (1973) called it – a ‘magnetic pull’ toward the future.”

“You see things as they are and ask: WHY? But I dream things that never were and ask: WHY NOT?” (George Bernard Shaw) “Staying within the frame of reference of the existing system and focusing on its problems hinders the RE-IMAGING of education.” “Rather than asking lots of questions about what is wrong with our existing system […] we should dream of kinds of education that never were and make the dream come true by design.”

DESIGN IS FUTURE CREATING AND NOT FUTURE GUESSING. “In education it means taking responsibility for designing systems […] that enable and empower future generations to direct their own lives and shape their own destiny.”

Focus on the learning-experience level with arrangements made in the environment of the learner by which the learner is enabled to fully realize his or her potential as an individual and as a participating and productive member of the society.

Vitruvius: “The science of the architect depends upon many disciplines and various apprenticeships which are carried out in other arts,” and “technology sets forth and explains things wrought in accordance with technical skills and methods.”

Jumping Mouse: The mouse left the well-known home ground and, encouraged by the frog, dared to jump high (transcending) and capture the image of the sacred mountains (envisioning). He then embarked on an arduous journey (the design journey), during which he had to give up his sight (leaving the past behind) in order to be guided to the top of the sacred mountain, where he became transformed into an eagle (the transformation phase of design).

Transition details:

“Mark the endings”

“Treat the past with respect”

“Let people take a piece of the old way with them”

“Show how endings ensure continuity of what really matters”

Appendix: “This article describes a general approach and a specific strategy for effecting the needed structural changes, and, also describes some initial progress on implementing that strategy.”

“Many solutions that are initially thought of as unworkable under current constraints, are in fact workable… much better results are achieved by initially thinking in the ideal.”

Our conversations also included this paper “The search for meaningful reform: A third-wave educational system” by Charles M. Reigeluth.

To dig deeper into the book and paper please read Joe’s fabulous notes.

Course Wrap

The day following the last session, Joe wrote a wrap of the (first) Peeragogy Innovations Pilot course.

Although Tufts Experimental College didn’t accept the full course for presentation Autumn 2020, I think it’s safe to say that our online community got a lot out of the small-scale pilot. We relaxed all kinds of requirements from the course syllabus. Instead of keeping a diligent schedule of readings and discussions, most people read and shared just a bit for their turn. The basic idea to have everyone do their own readings and focus the course time on sharing what we each learned seems to have worked very well.

Instead of starting challenging collaborative projects in the community, we had some small-scale adventures together. A particular highlight was the screening and discussion of a short film “The Crossing” about trafficking and modern day slavery. In this session we got to know folks involved with the Co-op University and Johnathan Worth of Think HubBub who facilitated the screening. Thanks to Chris Meadows for setting this up!

I had hoped that the seminar-style Thursday sessions would proceed in tandem with hands-on collaborative writing sessions to improve the Handbook. That too was more fitful than disciplined, but we did often meet on Mondays to check in about Handbook progress. My next goal here is to convert the book to a Tufte layout. We also made progress on a paper for Futures; work continues there. Many TODO items remain for the Handbook, going back (at least) to Roland’s reading group, which inspired the Pilot Course.

As an endorsement of the basic Peeragogical Innovations course model, Charlie and Charlotte are intending to meet next week to discuss Pilot 2! That meeting will take place on Thursday April 2. Note that the timezone differences
will reset then, details for the meeting will be announced closer to the date.

If you’re interested, you can read the feedback from the Experimental College about Joe’s original Course Proposal for Fall 2020.

Additional activities

Charlotte started folding

Discussing options for finding times to meet

Thinking about crowdsourced responses to COVID-19 and approaches to the challenge we face

Checking out

A digital pedagogy project

A new podcast from the Co-operative College, a distinctly peeragogical institution

A social media and politics discussion

Cool tools:

for workshops,

converting docs to markdown,

organizing notes,

whiteboarding,

references

Looking for help with our technical work that is mostly done on GitHub

We’ve been thinking a lot about futures, and Joe found another opportunity for us to submit a paper

What can we learn from Jimmy Wales about how the Wikipedia was built

Mixtape

French 79 feat. Sarah Rebecca – Diamond Veins

Peeragogy Monthly Wrap: 2020-02

Intro

CHICAGO – 30 March 2020 – During this complex time us humans are navigating, all of us involved in peeragogy hope you and your families are healthy, dear reader. We also would like to express our heartfelt thanks to every healthcare professional out there. They’re risking their lives to save us and fight COVID-19. Additionally we wish Doctors a happy National Doctor’s Day today and everyone a happy Women’s History Month!

To update you on what we’ve done since the last issue of our e-zine, we’re going to eat our own cooking and use a Peeragogical Action Review, or PAR, to summarize what we did in February 2020.

Peeragogical Action Review

Review the intention: what do we expect to learn or make together?

Learn how to do an online course by conducting an online course

Make progress on Version 4 of the handbook

Present a poster

You can download a PDF version of the poster here if you’d like! :)

Establish what is happening: what and how are we learning?

We made some progress on editing the handbook

There was a small, but mighty group of people going through the course and it went well!

What are some different perspectives on what’s happening?

The regular meeting times we found in January have been invaluable in terms of keeping us moving and giving our work a heartbeat

Like a television show pilot the course still has some kinks to work out, but it is looking very promising for the future

What did we learn or change?

Running an online course on peeragogy is fun

Floobits is a nice online tool for editing the handbook that connects directly to GitHub, although it is not the most user friendly for everyone

What else should we change going forward?

Keep improving how we learn and produce things collaboratively!

So what did we do in Feb?

Our work in February was divided into two main efforts: handbook edits and the peeragogy pilot course.

Monday Editing Sessions

We did a nice job of writing up wraps each week of our work that you can read below!

27 Jan

3 Feb

17 Feb

24 Feb

Thursday Pilot Course Sessions

We adapted the original proposal Joe Corneli made for running the course at a university into one we could run online on our own. We tried to follow the updated syllabus and you can see below how our learning adventure fared!

Materials by Course Week

23 Jan

Video

Notes

30 Jan

Video

06 Feb

Video

Chris Meadows’ Presentation

13 Feb

Video

20 Feb

Video

27 Feb

Video

The course kept going into March and we’ll report on those lessons in our next issue.

Discussed in the Google Group

We also had some exciting discussions in our email discussion group! Please join us.

Radical routes

Tufte CSS

explore Discord software tool

hard startups

“running wikipedia, with katherine maher – video”

Mixtape

LORN – ANVIL

What’re we doing this month

Watching and reading

We’ve been intrigued by the work of some innovative, impressive projects launched this month!

The Coronavirus Tech Handbook “provides a space for technologists, civic organisations, public & private institutions, researchers and specialists of all kinds to collaborate on a rapid and sophisticated response to the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent impacts. It is a quickly evolving resource with thousands of active expert contributors.”

There are details about how to help on their Librarians page and you can join their WhatsApp chat

Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies is crowdsourcing designs for physical tools people can use to fight the virus

There is lots of discussion and updates on their Facebook group

Cartoon infographics from Elanor Murray and team to help people understand what they can do to stay safe & healthy during the COVID19 pandemic

Educational resources on Wikiversity

In-progress Documents open for edits

Please edit, comment on, and/or read these drafts below!

Peeragogy Project Handbook Version 4 Manuscript - Roadmap guiding us towards finishing the newest version

Latest iterations of Peeragogy Handbook Version 4

Peeragogy Starter Pack was originally for Public Domain Day 2020. It is meant to help you learn more about how to use peeragogy in your own work, and how to participate in our project.

We’re planning to submit a paper to the “Call for Papers for a Special Issue from the 3rd International Conference on Anticipation” currently titled “WT: Greatest Flops Remixed – 10 years working on ‘The Project’”

Read the PDF of the March 24th draft

Edit the latest draft

Back in October we presented “A fictional peeragogical anticipatory learning exploration” at the Anticipation Conference

Peeragogy Monthly Wrap: 2020-01

Official version published on Wikiversity.

On this beautiful, sunny February 29th in Chicago I wish you both a happy Black History Month and happy leap day, dear reader! Welcome to our first e-zine issue of the decade!! Since we last published a wrap, we’ve found some ways to keep ourselves busy! :-)

Late last year a longtime peeragogue, Roland Legrand, led a reading group with the third edition of the Handbook as a text. They posted eight videos, plus left dozens of helpful comments and suggestions we can incorporate into the fourth edition! You can watch the videos on YouTube at the links below:

First reading

Second reading

Third reading

Fourth reading

Fifth reading

Sixth reading

DAO discussion

Final reading

The energy those peers created with their regular meetings was contagious and it infected out other activities! On the tech side, activity picked up in the Peeragogy GitHub repositories and we’ve been experimenting with new software applications. KeyBase is an instant messaging client with a clean user interface and Jitsi is a lightweight video conferencing app. We are intrigued, but the new tools have not replaced Google Hangouts or Zoom, both of which we still use regularly. Another app we still use a lot of is Google Docs, but we wanted something that synced better with those GitHub commits so we’re playing with Floobits and HackMD.

One example of a HackMD pad is the one being used to organize content for a course based around the Peeragogy Handbook, 3rd Edition that Joe Corneli is leading. In addition to providing educational value for current participants and improvements for the handbook, the course is also a test run for one Joe proposed to run at a university this fall.

When people come together for Joe’s course or in other communities, guidelines are often something that are written down and discussed. We made our first attempt at establishing community guidelines and would welcome your thoughts, dear reader!

In October we presented our work of design fiction at the Anticipation Conference in Oslo. Charlotte Pierce and Joe joined remotely and volunteers in the room helped me do the reading. We got feedback that our approach was too prescriptive giving lines to performers. Next time we plan to give the participants more agency over their performance by formally giving them time to interpret and adapt the content if they want. Hopefully that will make the whole experience more peeragogical!

One of the most interesting sessions I attended was “Future-making in education through Social Presencing Theatre: an awareness-based anticipatory methodology” which made use of Social Presencing Theater. The structured approach to expressing what you’re feeling in movement physically impacted me. Joe and I liked it so much we incorporated it into a submission we finished in December for another conference!

We put our heartbeat pattern into practice by finding common times we could meet across time zones. We successfully put it into practice in January and met multiple times a week! I also committed to writing a monthly wrap, so please check back in early March for a fresh issue!!

To close out with rhythm, please treat your ears to these two tracks which made it only our collaborative Monthly Mixtape:

Andy Fox featuring Laura: Fly Away

The Knife: Heartbeats

Licensing of this Resource

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Charlie Danoff. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: Charlie Danoff grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal waiver. The author of this work has dedicated it to the public by waiving all of his or her rights to the work under copyright law and all related or neighboring legal rights he or she had in the work, to the extend allowable by law. Legal Code

Important note: The text above shares a common purpose with Peeragogy Handbook and has been given a Creative Commons Zero Public Domain Dedication. To keep the handbooks in different languages consistent, when you edit this resource, you agree to release your contribution into the public domain. If you don’t want this or can’t do this due to license restrictions, please don’t edit.

Peeragogy Monthly Wrap: 2019-05

Drinking more of our own bubbles, in May we had two meetings where we hive edited (“Our methods include ‘Hive editing’ document meetings (working as a group using recorded Hangouts on Air together with Google Docs or Etherpads) … When writing collaboratively, some like to edit, others to comment. We learn from each other’s approaches and values, and create new values together, e.g., observing that it is very useful, when one person is talking during a meeting, for another to type a transcript of what that person is saying.” from our Building the Peeragogy Accelerator paper) our abstract. If you’re not familiar, hive editing is something we used to do a lot where we all jump on a video call with a document open in a web based word processor (e.g., Google Docs or Etherpad) and write together at the same time. It is a lovely combination of fun and productivity!

The abstract went through a lot of changes, which was the better for it by the end. We were proud of the revision and look forward sharing it at the conference! At the second meeting there were more hive edited improvements and a discussion of different ways the work could be presented. It’s a piece of fiction including a narrator, so someone suggested it would be fun to have each of us play a different role. Some people would be in the actual room and others could join remotely. There was also a thought of asking someone in the audience to join to make them feel included.

We’re open to more ideas though, what do you think would work best, reader?

Licensing of this Resource

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Charlie Danoff. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: Charlie Danoff grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal waiver. The author of this work has dedicated it to the public by waiving all of his or her rights to the work under copyright law and all related or neighboring legal rights he or she had in the work, to the extent allowable by law. Legal Code

Peeragogy Monthly Wrap: 2019-04

We did not progress on collecting success stories, but we met on the 14th and people added their links to the manuscript in progress. It was an exciting meeting because we had a newcomer join for the first time in a while! He told us he was working on open source software and getting social entrepreneurs to collaborate with one another instead of individually working towards disparate aims.

We listened to him and then someone brought up Jane Gooddall (“Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE: In July 1960, at the age of 26, Jane Goodall traveled from England to what is today Tanzania and bravely entered the little-known world of wild chimpanzees. … Today, Jane’s work revolves around inspiring action on behalf of endangered species, particularly chimpanzees, and encouraging people to do their part to make the world a better place for people, animals, and the environment we all share.”) and her work on human behavior change. Echoing the Ariyaratne quote, it was less about Non-Governmental Organizations coming in to impact change and never leaving; it’s most effective processes are when they work with locals to start the change and then hand it over.

We also answered his questions about peeragogy. To frame the discussion, we went reading aloud from Lisa’s peeragogy introduction (Peeragogy: An Introduction (draft) on Lisa’s Medium blog. Later she put out a revised PDF version), including a discussion of this anecdote about how people define teams differently:

But it hit me a little bit later when I was driving home. We were working from two different definitions of team. The Chivas definition was one in which all members were actively engage and empowered. We were all expected to be proactive problem solvers (and we had worked to give them the tools to be good problem solvers). We succeeded not just in building the team but our vision worked even relative to other teams around the league. Her definition of team was a top down definition of team. While, within the organization, participation was encouraged, for her and others immediately around her, this was not their working definition.

Additionally we discussed how her use of the couch metaphor is helpful to outline a possible return on investment for two people investing their time peeragogically:

Take two people and a couch. Individually they cannot move the couch on their own. Only when they work together can they move the couch. If they work together well, they will be able to move the couch effectively and efficiently. So, when you have two people who work well together, you have the benefit of both of their talents separately AND you have the benefit (plus alpha) of things that they can do together that they could never do on their own. In a very real sense, 1 [plus] 1 [equals] 3 or [equals] 4 or [equals] 5.

After the meeting, near the end of April, we received word that our submission to the anticipation conference had been accepted. Our next task was to revise the abstract before May 30th.

Licensing of this Resource

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Charlie Danoff. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: Charlie Danoff grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal waiver. The author of this work has dedicated it to the public by waiving all of his or her rights to the work under copyright law and all related or neighboring legal rights he or she had in the work, to the extent allowable by law. Legal Code

Peeragogy Monthly Wrap: 2019-03

You’re reading the summary of our first meeting of a series conducted in Q1 and Q2. Our fun work included reviewing each other’s blog posts, introducing a newcomer to the project, revising an abstract, and hearing how Nepalese peers help one another!

Following the vernal equinox we held four meetings discussing peeragogy (check out our latest Peeragogy Handbook to learn more! There is also an earlier version of the Handbook on Wikibooks), which is our way to describe how peer learning and production work. In an effort to drink our own champagne, we’re implementing our wrapper pattern (see Peeragogy Wrapper Pattern description in the Peeragogy Handbook) by creating this meeting artifact you’re now reading: “Someone involved with the project should regularly create a wrap-up summary, distinct from other project communications, that makes current activities comprehensible to people who may not have been following all of the details.”

If you have any questions about these notes and/or the project in general, dear reader (this is an old technique in fiction where the author directly address the reader, which we’re using to make this a conversation! We want to know what you think!! Cliff Notes has a nice write up about how the technique was used in Adam Bede. “The technique, then, is first of all a convention. Eliot pretends throughout that Adam Bede is a true story. She takes the pose of one who is merely recording events which she has heard recounted. … The ‘dear reader’ technique also serves some practical functions. Because the author pretends to be ‘outside’ her own story, she is free to comment in her own voice upon the characters and events she creates.”), please reach out by emailing peeragogy@googlegroups.com!

March Meeting

When we last met in December, we defined some 2019 first quarter goals:

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.

Aside from the fact that some of our writings exceed three paragraphs, I feel like we made good progress towards our Q1 goals. Lisa published a Medium blog post “Peeragogy: An Introduction (draft)” (later she put out a revised PDF version), Joe wrote a draft of a new article on our PubPub (it’s a tool for collaborative writing) instance, I compiled a submission to the Anticipation conference (“Anticipation 2019 is a unique, radically interdisciplinary forum for exploring how ideas of the future inform action in the present. It brings together researchers, policy makers, scholars and practitioners to push forward thinking on issues ranging from modelling, temporality and the present to the design, ethics and power of the future. This conference includes attention to design amongst other domains.”), we met in March, and we sent some emails to the public group (including introducing a newcomer to our fun world – Joe welcomed him by implementing our newcomer pattern in our Google Group).

During that March meeting our discussion topics included:

Siblings

Paola’s research and exciting upcoming presentation

Simplifying buddhism and applying it to modern times (similar books read by Joe & Lisa)

Quote about time for change

Community Organizers: animal management advocates ManuMitra (the group has a Facebook page and this description is from a Global Alliance for Rabies Control article: “It was a risk to design a project which hinges entirely on the community. But we found no shortage of local people willing to work voluntarily for street dogs. Even (or perhaps especially) in the most underprivileged communities, there are individuals who resolve human-dog conflict or unofficially act as a font of knowledge on dogs. They are the experts in their local dogs and local humans, and they are permanent residents. It would be inappropriate for us to come and attempt to do their job – the only question we should ask is, ‘how can we help these people?’” queried Basanta Gautam, ManuMitra’s community coordinator) in Nepal being more helpful for accomplishing dog management than traditional hierarchical aid organizations
Picture of dog in Boudhanath, Nepal in 2016.

The community organization chat reminded us of the community lifting itself up by its bootstraps story we quoted in our first paragogy paper (Corneli, J. and Danoff, C. 2011. Paragogy. Proceedings of the 6th Open Knowledge Conference. “Paragogy is a theory of peer learning: we endeavor to say how it works, and how it works best. This paper outlines paragogy’s contemporary relevance and expounds its principles, showing their connections to other theories. We present an extended example of paragogy in practice, where we use it to evaluate our experiences working at the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).”):

A. T. Ariyaratne’s essay on Rural Self Help, one of the foundational writings of the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka 6, begins:

“Nobody needs to teach rural communities about ‘group effort’ and ‘self-help’. […] The real question, therefore, is to examine what are the constraints that exist inhibiting the expression of their group effort and self-help qualities designed to improve food and nutrition levels, clothing,shelter, health, sanitation, education and cultural life?”

We approach peer learning in a similar spirit: it is something we all know how to do, but can’t always do well. Intuitively, there are bound to be difficulties for a group of peers studying a subject together, outside a traditional classroom or without a teacher. Indeed, peer learning is different from other forms of group effort, the proverbial “barn raising” for example, in which the persons involved can be presumed to know how to build barns – or at least to know someone who knows, and stand ready to take orders.

Coming out of the meeting, we defined some action items:

Meet in April

Review manuscript in progress doc and add links to more work

Collect success stories

Licensing of this Resource

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Charlie Danoff. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: Charlie Danoff grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal waiver. The author of this work has dedicated it to the public by waiving all of his or her rights to the work under copyright law and all related or neighboring legal rights he or she had in the work, to the extent allowable by law. Legal Code

Peeragogy Monthly Wrap: 2018-12

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: peeragogy@googlegroups.com

Private email: peeragogy@gmail.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/peeragogy

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peeragogy

GitHub: https://github.com/Peeragogy

Licensing of this Resource

Original text by Charlie Danoff dedicated to the Public Domain, as specified below.

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Charlie Danoff. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: Charlie Danoff grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal waiver. The author of this work has dedicated it to the public by waiving all of his or her rights to the work under copyright law and all related or neighboring legal rights he or she had in the work, to the extent allowable by law. Legal Code