Abstract: This paper considers the problem of peer producing rich online learning environments, a task that appears techno-socially feasible, but is not without challenge. We draw on the selfprofessedly “utopian” approach developed by Baudrillard in “The Mirror of Production”, to establish and understand our two key dimensions of leverage (language and recycling). We then extend a recent paper by Corneli and Danoff on the topic of peer learning with a set of guidelines for practitioners. Our conclusion supports active peer production of learning environments, against a “provisionist” strategy, but we recognize that our paragogical agenda may be at odds with established educational systems in some respects, but perhaps in a complementary manner. p. 1

Peer produced education would take the idea of the participatory creation of educational and informational resources (like Wikipedia) and expand them with support for the experiential aspects of learning. Much as Google integrated pages on the the internet into a new kind of lightweight digital library, the most intuitive approach to building a “hyper-textbook” would be to integrate user inputs and interactions into a new kind of mediatedly-social, knowledge rich learning environment. The paper discusses this problem with the following major ideas in mind: 1. Language is the primary observable phenomenon on the internet. 2. A major problem becomes recycling user (typically student) inputs to turn them into something more immediately useful. 3. Developer-practitioners, who are themselves peer learners, will benefit from some shared understandings about how to develop such systems. p. 1

LANGUAGE AND PEER LEARNING Language is not produced by certain people and consumed by others; everyone is at the same time a producer and a consumer. In fact, there are neither producers nor consumers and what is established is not the general equivalence of individuals vis-à-vis language, but an immediate reciprocity of exchange through language. – (Baudrillard, 1975, p. 97) p. 2

We could make use of PageRank-like ideas to study and develop peer learning techniques. For example, we could label people who write about similar concepts as “peers”, and assign them a ranking as “experts” based on how much they have contributed on a given topic. Rankings could be used for prestige or price-signalling, to build teams, or find mentors, tutors, conversation partners, or simply to identify interesting things to read. At a much simpler prototype level, this could all also be done in a “discretized” way, just by asking participants to self-identify interests and skill level. Thus, people can be “peers” if they have a common interest, or a common (self-identified) skill level related to that interest. Co-learning and working groups could be established with peer learners who will have similar questions about their applied projects, and expert guides who would help with these projects (perhaps for a fee). A current “applied” conversation about these ideas is developing at the Free Technology Academy (Note 3). p. 2

RECYCLING Out of the various conceptions of human ecology that have a bearing on education (Bateson (2000), Star and Groesemer (1989), Engeström (2007), etc.), the most relevant to our setting is George McCalla, writing on “The Ecological Approach to the Design of E-Learning Environments: Purpose-based Capture and Use of Information About Learners” (McCalla, 2004). “In a phrase, p. 2

the approach involves attaching models of users to the information they interact with, and then mining these models for patterns that are useful for various purposes.” Insofar as it reuses interaction data that would otherwise be lost, McCalla’s idea is reminiscent of what Slavoj Žižek refers to as total recycling: p. 3

The challenge raised by the idea of peer production for these environments is to think less in “provisionist” terms (if we supply the right resources to students, they will do well), and more in terms of how those involved can take up the opportunities that are available to them today (Boud and Lee, 2005). p. 3

PARAGOGICAL PRAXIS Praxis, a noble activity, is always one of use, as distinct from poesis which designates fabrication. Only the former, which plays and acts, but does not produce, is noble. (Baudrillard, 1975, p. 101) p. 4

Here, we can follow the same basic procedure to establish recommendations for paragogical praxis itself. In other words, we take the “paragogical principles” from Corneli and Danoff (2011) as a set of problems to be solved in practice, and present some conjectural solutions. The principles are: 1. Changing context as a decentered center. We interact by changing the space. 2. Meta-learning as a font of knowledge. We interact by changing what we know about ourselves. 3. Peers provide feedback that wouldn’t be there otherwise. We interact by changing our perspective on things. 4. Learning is distributed and nonlinear. We interact by changing the way things connect. 5. Realize the dream if you can, then wake up! We interact by changing our objectives. There is a tension between a practical, action-oriented approach to learning and adaptation, and the whimsical, nonlinear, non-coercive modality of peer production. These are our points of advice on how to deal with this tension. p. 4

1. Develop empirical studies and a critical apparatus. The challenge is to find or create learning environments that we can analyze and critique along various relevant dimensions (“are people learning”, “is the system growing and improving”, etc.). In Corneli and Ponti (2012), we begin to establish a critical apparatus of this nature in the concrete case of mathematics learning. More generally, language and metadata are typically what are available for us to study (Section 2). 2. Find companions for the journey. Not all peer learning experiences are created equal, particularly in terms of how deeply interested the participants are in understanding the process itself. Procedural investigations may be pejoratively deemed “navel-gazing” by those who are not interested; Sloterdijk (2011) considers non-pejorative variations on the theme, as part of his massive project to understand coexistence, beginning with life in the womb. This project should give rise to a philosophical discourse that we can learn from as participants. 3. Work with real users. Some institutions are incorporating trendy networked learning techniques into their pedagogy, and students are generally far ahead of this trend. Students are intensely interested in working systems. On the other hand, proselytizing more staid institutional players will generally result in a clash, p. 4

4. Study and build nonlinear interfaces. We need systems that support nonlinearity in writing, reading, and editing. Natural questions like “give me all of the problems in multivariable calculus that don’t yet have solutions” should be easy to get answers to; and new queries should be equally easy to ask. Contemporary technologies like SPARQL, Git, and Etherpad, among others, can be brought to bear, but there will be further design problems to solve. We do not think of p. 4

these tools in terms of “technological determinism” or even in terms of “provisionism” in the educational context (Section 3), but rather, as part of a workshop or laboratory for open experimentation with nonlinear effects. 5. Limit philosophizing. Philosophical talk is not going to solve our practical problems, but we may be better able to understand what the practical problems are through this discussion. (But cf. Cornell (1992).) p. 5

CONCLUSION p. 5

BIBLIOGRAPHY p. 6

Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, University of Chicago Press ed. edition. p. 6

Boud, D. and Lee, A. (2005). ‘Peer learning’ as pedagogic discourse for research education. Studies in Higher Education, 30(5):501–516. p. 6

Corneli, J. and Ponti, M. (2012). Detecting mathematics learning online. In: Hodgson, V., Jones, C., de Laat, M., McConnell, D., Ryberg, T., and Sloep, P., editors, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Networked Learning 2012. (To appear.). p. 6

McCalla, G. (2004). The ecological approach to the design of e-learning environments: Purposebased capture and use of information about learners. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 7. p. 6