Paragogy clippings
At the end of the first course I taught solo, I asked students for their frank opinions of what was working and what could work better. I didn't want to wait for anonymous evaluations, which don't afford dialogue or collaboration. The first pushback was a strong request for more project-based collaboration, shared earlier in the semester. From the beginning, I had asked students to use the tools we were studying and using – social bookmarking, forum discussions, blog posts and comment threads, collaboratively edited wiki documents – to organize team projects of four to six students. The first year I tried this, we discovered that four students work better than six for a semester-long project – division of labor, intra-group communication, assessment, and the nature of the final presentation rapidly grow more complex with more than four collaborators. When teams presented their projects at the end of the term, we were all so astounded that one student astutely asked (to general acclamation): “Why can't we show each other this kind of collaboration earlier than the last class meeting?” We had learned that learning to collaborate ought to be collaborative – the teams should interact with the other students in the class as co-responsible learners during the collaboration process, not just as an audience for the final product. Toward Peeragogy | DMLcentral
Between the co-teaching teams, the collaborative projects, and our inquiries into the nature of community – online and face-to-face – the powerful idea of making our class into a community of co-learners who cooperated to help each other learn began to take over. The goal of using our physical class time and online interactions to grow into a learning community is now baked into the syllabus – I ask prospective students to read and commit to fulfilling their role in the community's co-learning before they are admitted to the class. Toward Peeragogy | DMLcentral
I confronted the laptop-in-classroom issue by initiating “attention probes” such as showing the class a video of themselves or asking them to close the lids of their laptops when they weren't actively using them. Now (again at students' suggestion) I open a forum discussion thread at the beginning of the term, soliciting the students' suggestions about potential attention probes to try in class. I am no longer surprised when student variations on my bright ideas turn out better than my original version. I know now that the syllabus and lesson plans will always change from year to year – as long as I pay attention to my co-learners.
“Co-learners” came into my vocabulary and practice when I started experimenting with my own purely online courses. I had grown accustomed to addressing my weekly emails to “esteemed students” in my university teaching. The first time I started composing a message to my online class, I called them “co-learners” instead of “students,” and the simple change in nomenclature – together with my by-now ingrained habit of co-designing my teaching with my students – led to immediate and remarkable enthusiasm. The difference might just be semantic, but it proved to be a surprisingly powerful demonstration of word magic. Toward Peeragogy | DMLcentral
I have not abdicated my role as “expert learner,” but opening up to co-learning has produced nothing but positive results so far. Toward Peeragogy | DMLcentral
In retrospect, I can see the coevolution of my learning journey: my first step was to shift from conventional lecture-discussion-test classroom techniques to lessons that incorporated social media, my second step gave students co-teaching power and responsibility, my third step was to elevate students to the status of co-learner. It began to dawn on me that the next step was to explore ways of instigating completely self-organized, peer-to-peer online learning.
The ultimate test of peer learning is to organize a course without the direction of an instructor. Although subject-matter experts and skilled learning facilitators are always a bonus, it is becoming clear that with today's tools and some understanding of how to go about it, groups of self-directed learners can organize their own courses online. P2PU and other examples are harbingers. In Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich predicted in 1971 that learners of the future would find each other and use information technologies to form “learning webs” and “networks” – prescient terms, considering that the ARPAnet was only two years old at the time. It didn't take long for my initial explorations to uncover dozens of nascent p2p learning platforms, new learning forms such as Massive Online Open Classes (MOOCs), and emerging theories of “paragogy.” Toward Peeragogy | DMLcentral
I've been invited to deliver the 2011 Regents' Lecture at University of California, Berkeley. I intend to expand the paragogy universe by instigating a peer-created guide to pure peer-to-peer learning. I'm calling it “peeragogy.” While “paragogy” is more etymologically correct, “peeragogy” is self-explanatory. In my lecture, I'll explain the evolution of my own pedagogy and reveal some of what I've discovered in the world of online self-organized learning. Then I will invite volunteers to join me in a two week hybrid of face-to-face seminars and online discussion. Can we self-organize our research, discover, summarize, and prioritize what is known through theory and practice, then propose, argue, and share a tentative resource guide for peeragogical groups? In theory, those who use our guide to pursue their own explorations can edit the guide to reflect new learning. Toward Peeragogy | DMLcentral
Yasmin Kafai
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Some years ago Cynthia Ching and I also wrote about what we called “peer pedagogy” to emphasize the many resources learners actually have to engage in peer-to-peer learning successfully. This was before all the online communities became fashionable but still offer some interesting perspectives on how those experiences can shape how you teach [as a peer] without necessarily formal instruction.
Ching, C. C. & Kafai, Y. B. (2008) Peer pedagogy: Student collaboration and reflection in a learning through design project. Teachers College Record, 110, 2601-2632. Toward Peeragogy | DMLcentral
Searching on “peer pedagogy” reveals a number of other useful resources. Thank you! Toward Peeragogy | DMLcentral
Cathy Davidson's bold experiments in peer-to-peer learning, including “crowd-sourcing grading,” gave me a working model to emulate and appropriate. I learned from Mizuko Ito that young people use digital skills and knowledge exchange as social currency in fan cultures – Pop-Up University | DMLcentral
Henry Jenkins taught me about participatory culture and the importance of teaching skills of credibility (what I call “crap detection”) transmedia storytelling, collective intelligence, and network smarts. Pop-Up University | DMLcentral
Online, there are no chairs, but because of the absence of the customary face to face script – what sociologist Erving Goffman would call the “working consensus” that comes with students, classrooms, and professors – I need to take that much more care of the pre-structuring. I make a model blog post, set up the first discussion topics in the forums, make multimedia minicourses available, and create a slideshow and agenda for our first live session. Even carefully creating the conditions and enthusiastically modeling the behavior I want to elicit isn't sufficient. As one of my mentors, Lisa Kimball, taught me, a good online facilitator pays heed to the containers, but also thinks in terms of tempo. I knew the importance of engaging as many of the co-learners as possible in the first live session and the first weekend of forum and blog discussion. Pop-Up University | DMLcentral
Then I use an exercise I learned from Steve Hargadon's masterful facilitation of Classroom 2.0 live sessions: I put a world map up on the whiteboard and ask participants to put a dot on their location and to type into the chat window their location, the time of day and the weather. Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online | DMLcentral
I ask the co-learners to self-organize into teams to help make sense of the information that will be flowing through multiple channels during the live session. I type roles on the whiteboard and show how to use the whiteboard tools to enter, format and move around elements. Roles include searchers, chat summarizers, session summarizers, mindmap leaders, session bloggers. I ask co-learners to write their own names on the whiteboard next to the roles they want to take, show them how to create break-out rooms to coordinate their collaborations, and ask the summarizers to feed their output to the bloggers, who take responsibility for posting a reflective summary of the session later in our asynchronous learning environment, the Social Media Classroom (SMC). Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online | DMLcentral
Sometimes I see a text question in the chat and respond by speaking aloud. When anyone mentions a relevant term, tool, website, person, the search team puts a URL into the chat, the chat summarizers list the URLs with brief descriptions, and in their breakout rooms, the session summarizers and blog team confer, the mindmappers agree on top-level and second-level branching categories. We've been at it for ten minutes and we're already a collective intelligence. It's confusing at first, but it is also flowing. Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online | DMLcentral
I have another question for you and this discussion — how do we balance the peer and connectedness of learning and information channels with our natural needs of indpendent thinking and problem-solving? There have been a few articles lately talking about the backlash of the super-collaborative culture we’re in now (see this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html).
This idea of “quiet” and “alone” time for allowing the brain to really work resonates for me, but I think that really effective approaches would combine the individual learning strategies with peeragogy. Peeragogy: Self Organized Peer Learning in Networks | Beth’s Blog
used real-time learning analytics:
Before he class, he assigns a pre-reading from the textbook. He expects students to read the assignment before they come to class so that instructional time can be spent helping them make sense of it and apply to their work. Mazur uses technology,a web-based monitoring system where students submit answers to questions about the reading prior to coming to class. The last question asks students to tell Mazur what confused them. He uses their answers to prepare a set of multiple-choice questions he uses during class. Mazur starts the class with a brief explanation of a concept he wants students to understand. Then he asks one of the multiple-choice questions. Students get a minute to think about the question on their own and then answer it using a mobile device that sends their answers to Mazur’s laptop. Next, he asks the students to turn to the person sitting next to them and talk about the question. The class typically erupts in a cacophony of voices, as it did that first time he told students to talk to each other because he couldn’t figure out what else to do. Once the students have discussed the question for a few minutes, Mazur instructs them to answer the question
It i Creating Learning Experiences That Connect, Inspire, and Engage | Beth’s Blog
What does a group of people who want to colearn a subject together need to know about methods, pedagogy, resources, tech to put it together themselves?
To find, vet, prioritize resources, construct a syllabus and learning activities, and use online media to co-teach, co-learn- dividing the labor of facilitation? arenastudies | Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge | Blinking on emerging learning theories
On the following I write some concepts from several ideas about Howard´s experience regarding Peeragogy that I found interesting because they reflects a self acknowledgment of this theory:
Sharing power (empowering students): “The more I give my teacher-power to students and encourage them to take more responsibility for their own learning, the more they show me how to redesign my ways of teaching”.
Sharing Interactivity & Collaboration “We had learned that learning to collaborate ought to be collaborative — the teams should interact with the other students in the class as co-responsible learners during the collaboration process, not just as an audience for the final product”.
Sharing responsibility: “I asked several students to take responsibility each week for conveying the main points of the texts and helping me to engage others in classroom discussions about the readings”.
Shared meanings: “Co-learners came into my vocabulary and practice when I started experimenting with my own purely online courses”.
Shared Knowledge: “…when I tell them I’m attuned to learning from them while they are learning from me”. arenastudies | Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge | Blinking on emerging learning theories
For me, paragogy is an extension of the concept of scaffolding (proposed by Jerome Bruner), where knowledgeable others (teachers or peers) can create optimal learning environments in which students can learn more than they would if they were studying on their own. Paragogy takes scaffolding farther though, because peers are in an equal relationship. The exchange conditions are duplex - that is, they work both ways and reciprocal learning is achieved as learners connect with each other, share their content and ideas, and engage in dialogue. If this sounds familiar, it is exactly what happens informally day in, day out on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. Paragogy may also find more synergy than andragogy with emerging explanatory frameworks of digital age learning such as connectivism (Downes and Siemens). Digital age learning
JUL
8
Paragogy is a name for the theory of peer-to-peer or
peer-based teaching-and-learning-between-equals.
A more informal synonym is “peertagogy”.
The theory of paragogy is developed in opposition to
“andragogy”. Here are its defining principles as I see
them today.
1. CONTEXT AS A DECENTERED CENTER
A paragogic view suggests that everyone has a mixture of
“dependent”, “self-directed”, and “other-directed”
behaviours, without saying that any of these is “good” or
“bad”. It suggests that a self-concept may be less
important than the concept of “shared context in motion”.
This has various consequences, e.g. as to the relative
value placed on social intelligence and so-called “mental
age”. It also de-emphasizes personality-based critiques
in favour of a critique of social/dynamical systems.
2. META-LEARNING IS A FONT OF KNOWLEDGE
A paragogic view says that we all have a lot to learn
about learning.
3. PEERS ARE PEOPLE WHO LEARN TOGETHER
A peer isn't necessarily someone who happens to be stuck
in the same ruts you are stuck in. In fact, the paragogic
view says you can learn from practically anyone, and that
people who learn from one another are “peers”.
4. LEARNING IS DISTRIBUTED AND NONLINEAR
Learning, whether with a given application in mind,
or for some other reason, can come from many different
sources. Part of paragogy is learning how to work one's
way around a given social field.
5. REALISE YOUR DREAM AND THEN WAKE UP
Realising a motivation seems at least as important as its
existence in the first place. Merely indicating that a
given motivation is “internal” or “external” is likely not
to be fine-grained enough to be very useful. Paragogy is
the art of realising motivations when possible, then going
on to the next thing. Gathatoulie: paragogical principles
organizational learning
See http://www.solonline.org/ for some details. ParagogyConcepts - Paragogy.net
learning analytics
See http://www.solaresearch.org/ for some further information. ParagogyConcepts - Paragogy.net
affective filter
A concept from Stephen Krashen's theory of second language acquisition, which basically says that some people are more timid about making a fool of themselves than others. ParagogyConcepts - Paragogy.net
Is paragogy just a philosophy of low-self esteem? (i.e. it forbids the individual to do things on his/her own, in an empowered way? ParagogyCritiques - Paragogy.net
The five principles:
1st principle: Not really clear to grasp. Don't the learners always constitute part of the context? What seems to be key, is the egalitarian vs. the authoritarian method as is described at http://p2pu.org/general/node/15138/forums/25213
2nd principle: What does this specifically have top do with peer learning? Isn't the knowledge how to learn important for every kind of learning, individual, peer-based, teacher-based etc.?
4th principle: This holds also true for individual, text-based learning. Or is text-based learning (reading) also understood as peer-learning? The whole concept of peer-learning seems very fuzzy and the text doesn't help eliminating the fuzziness.
5th principle is also very fuzzy. Is it a principle for peer-based learning or for learning itself? The example points to a case of individual learning… ParagogyCritiques - Paragogy.net
“Paragogy is a theory of peer learning”: are there other theories of peer learning?
“an extended example where we apply paragogy to critique our experiences ”: a theory can not really be applied, maybe tested.
“We use the term paragogy to characterize the study and practice of peer learning.”: how can a term characterize something?
“In paragogy, we recognize that we are not merely teachers or learners”: here it seems to be synonymous to peer learning. ParagogyCritiques - Paragogy.net
Maybe you could use a structure like Tom Gruber. He wrote a paper defining “ontology”[1]. At the beginning has a very long definition at the beginning and then used the rest of the paper to explain each part of this definition. We call it the Gruber Design pattern. Another helpful thing to define a concept is actually defining, what it is not to give it some contour. I recently wrote two definitions (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_extraction and http://svn.aksw.org/papers/2011/WWW_NKE/nke_public_draft.pdf) and know how much work it is to get a definition straight. As I said, I am definitely not an expert, but reading the paper left me in the dark, what Paragogy actually is about. On the other hand, I found the topic interesting and it is relevant for OKCon. ParagogyCritiques - Paragogy.net
↑ Gruber, T. R (1995). “Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing”. International Journal of Human Computer Studies 43 (5): 907-928. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.91.6025&rep=rep1&type=pdf. ParagogyCritiques - Paragogy.net
Note that since writing the first two papers, we've had more exposure to critiques of “this kind of paper”, notably
Lisewski, B., and P. Joyce, Examining the Five Stage e-Moderating Model: Designed and Emergent Practice in the Learning Technology Profession, Association for Learning Technology Journal, 11 (2003), 55-66.
and it seems likely that a bigger work would take better account of the more “mature” critical reflective style used in that paper. ParagogyBookIdeas - Paragogy.net
I've decided in the “Practice” section to rewrite the (second) Paragogy paper backwards, using the same high-level outline that we used when working on that paper. The outline is something I came up with after messing around with a printout of the first paragogy paper and some mystical kabbalistic ideas (see http://hyperreal-enterprises.posterous.com/paragogy-paper). I later realized that those ideas meshed with some buddhist ideas in an interesting way (see http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com/2011/11/judeo-buddhist.html), so this produced a sort of refinement of the outline, or parallel text, to use in the essays. ParagogyBookIdeas - Paragogy.net
Yoko Akama had an interesting critique of a paper by Tomlinson et al., suggesting to me that we need a new paper that covers:
“the complexity and negotiation around ownership, conflict resolution, establishing trust, building openness, decision-making processes.” ParagogyPaperIdeas - Paragogy.net
