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
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
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:
- 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