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:

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:

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:

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