Tippy Top
For some background on what we’re doing here, please see Introduction to Pattern Languages.
Peeragogy
How do we improve at learning and engaging?
By paying attention to their dynamics.
And this accelerates when we work together.
Problem
How do you learn when there is no teacher, or textbook; only each other — and you’re stuck?
Practice peeragogy, i.e., learn and understand the patterns that are transferrable.
Significant change and creativity only ever happens in the real world, where we’re subject to the pressure of being effective.
Micro-case studies
“Hard science vs soft science”
All else equal I would prefer to do my scientific research but collaborators are preoccupied and the situation breaks down.
So, I’ve engaged with some soft patterns like Heartbeat and Zettlekasten and I can get it working again.
Science is done within a community so if the context hasn’t come prefab’ed it needs to be constructed.
Solution
The problem we consider is the same one Spinoza talked about: the problem of human freedom.
The solution we’ve found relates to engagement in understanding the process of learning and creativity.
We write and think about the forms of organisation that sustain and empower people.
Convening
When you first start thinking about a problem it can be hard to wrap your mind around it.
If you get in touch with other people who are thinking about similar things, that can contextualise your thinking.
Others will have seen different aspects of the problem: they don’t see exactly what you see.
Newcomer
Newcomers can feel overwhelmed by the amount of things to learn.
We focus on newcomers as "us", and try to make it clear what we are actively learning, and who "we" are, and how we learn — and teach!
When there's learning, there’s someone who is new to a topic, and hopefully someone to give some guidance even if they figure it out on the fly.
A specific project
It's easy to think about issues that matter: there are many of them.
If you are able to get concrete about something to do, learn, and achieve, you move from thinking about a topic to becoming a practitioner.
You find yourself interested in or concerned about something, but you only have a vague idea about how it works or how you fit in.
Organizing
We can’t learn unless there’s a structure there to learn, and a way of apprehending that structure.
So there are two structures here that need to be brought into communication.
Organization exists at many levels: matter in space, events in time, species in the world of biology, cultural patterns in society.
Heartbeat
How will the effort be sustained and coordinated sufficiently?
People seem to naturally gravitate to something with a pulse.
A number of people have a shared interest, and have connected with each other: however, they are not going to spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week working together.
Roadmap
In order to collaborate, people need a way to share current, though incomplete, understanding of the space they are working in, and to nurture relationships with one another and the other elements of this space.
Building a guide to the goals, activities, experiments and working methods can help newcomers and old-timers alike understand their relationship with the project.
The discussants or contributors who collaborate on a project have different points of view and heterogeneous priorities, but they come together in conversations and joint activities.
Cooperation
Moving to a well-formulated problem requires concerted effort.
Coordinate effort that involves the concerned parties.
Part of this is finding partial solutions elsewhere, and places where you can contribute.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Many projects die because the cost of Reinventing the Wheel is too high.
"Steal like an artist," and make it possible for other people to build on your work too.
In a peer production context, you are simultaneously "making stuff" and building on the work of others.
Assessment
You’ll have to find ways to figure out what constitutes progress.
Your mind and body will tell you when you’re training and learning, and when you’re overdoing it or treading water.
Confer with others to get their assessments, which won’t be obvious to you unless you ask.
Scrapbook
Not all of the ideas we've come up with have proved workable.
In order to maintain focus, is important to "tune" and "prune" the things we give our attention to.
We have maintained and revised our pattern catalog, and we are achieving some of the "What's Next" steps associated with some of the patterns.
Carrying capacity
How can we help prevent those people who are involved with the project from over-promising or over-committing, and subsequently crashing and burning?
Serious frustration is a sign that it's time to revisit the group's and your own individual plan.
There's only so much any one person can do, since we all have limited time and energy.
Share
You’ll want to get input and feedback from other people who are concerned.
Keep them in the loop, create ways for them to engage.
This applies across all the ongoing activities, as well as the products.
Wrapper
In an active project, it can be effectively impossible to stay up to date with all of the details.
Someone involved with the project should regularly create a wrap-up summary — distinct from other project communications. In the long run it’s valuable if more than one person practices this role.
You are part of an active, long-running, and possibly quite complex project.
Play
Learning isn’t always something we’re motivated to do, so we ask: "What makes learning fun?"
There are deep links between play and learning.
Play can be seen as a sub-set of collaborative design.
Context
The bigger challenge is always: to manifest meaningful relationships.
That happens through communication.
And always within a bigger context.
The Peeragogy Project
The Peeragogy project is just one of the contexts in which ‘peeragogy’ happens.
It’s driven by volunteers who are interested in understanding peer learning and peer production better to apply it in their own contexts.
The project has been going since 2012: it was convened by Howard Rheingold.
Project
Since we have been at it for quite a while we have a lot of data on how things have been going, but maybe not yet such a clear sense of where it’s going.
In order to get anywhere we need to keep apprised of all of our resources; as well as whether and how they are sustained.
In any enterprise it makes sense to be careful to ‘spread tasks thin, not people’.
Website
The key informatic challenges are those of accessing and interacting with information
This means that when we write we’re not only posting updates but also working to make the material a two way street (or multi-way roadmap!)
Our project exists in a context of readers, viewers, contributors, and others who might want to interact with our materials
Course
It’s not peeragogy unless it’s collaborative: simultaneously, we can’t expect people to “get it” unless we co-create opportunities to “do with us”.
A set of interactive exercises that help people wrap their hearts and minds around peeragogy can help us understand if it’s working.
In the context of ‘education’ this may be a renegade activity; in workplace cultures, open learning may also be unfamiliar. But peeragogy thrives in open settings!
Podcast
Help us understand what we actually have to offer
A series of structured discussions
People have interesting things to say
Paper
Develop thinking along a number of complex and somewhat novel directions
Write one or more academic papers to a high standard, suitable for discussing with specialists
With specialist topics there are discipline-specific communities who are ready to discuss and give feedback
Community
We can’t expect everyone who has interesting things to say to come on our podcast; besides, they might have more to teach us in context
Interact with some other communities on their home turf and report back
Groups of a certain size with porous boundaries
Handbook
Can we create a common ground for people to engage with?
Writing gives us something concrete to do in collaboration
It’s one reasonably accessible way for us to get started organizing contents and contributors
Technologies
How we approach technologies makes a big difference: do we think of them simply as tools to use, or as material that we can bend?
Becoming empowered to use and work with technology comes especially from disciplined practice: a form of apprenticeship.
Technologies are part of our the modern landscape, their nature is to be put to use, whether for good or for ill, or a mixture of the two.
Forums
How do we find common ground to speak about things?
Create an empty, neutral space where people can come together.
This empty space should be in communication with as much of the rest of the space as possible.
Wiki
How can we organise our thoughts?
Link key concepts together, preserving flexibility about both the content and the structure.
We want to be able to have multiple perspectives and multiple expressions of ideas related to a body of content.
Social Bookmarking
How can we understand something if we can’t or don’t want to access its internals?
We can know the thing external, by sharing how to access and simple notes?
There are things that we can point to but we can’t easily share
Realtime
We have spatial distance between us, and time zones can separate us as well.
Now, though, we can set up a call that allows us to be more accessible, including w/ low-bandwidth solutions.
We can interact with whatever is in front of us, by using technology to bridge across time and space: radio is the "technology that annihilates distance" (Tesla)
Connectivism
How can we prioritize our limited time and personal bandwidth.
Learning should focus on where and to find and interact with information; however this won’t yet allow us to do learning at a deeper level.
There are learning resources that we can access (even if we haven’t found them yet): these could include peers who we can learn with.
Case Studies
If we want to learn about peeragogy, we need to amass and study the cases in which it actually happens.
The ‘unit of analysis’ is social in nature, and the method of analysis is through patterns.
Peeragogy can happen anywhere people come together: in education, the workplace, or communities.
Emacs Research Group
If we tackle big enough projects, this will bring with it the need for collaboration.
Text editing can become part of a system for addressing large-scale existential problems, by expanding the frontier of what we edit.
We’ve made progress since we started with the raw themes of Research on/in/with Emacs back in December 2020.
FORMAL PATTERNS
Using patterns, todo items, CLA, and PARs in an intuitive manner is clearly workable at a small scale, but could become chaotic when we scale up; this conflicts with our perspective that these methods can be applied broadly.
Can we develop a more mathematically precise way to describe this set of tools? We might build on the earlier work of Corneli et al. which describes patterns as conceptual blends.
Working with project- and change-management Technologies across a distributed Community.
SERENDIPITY
The idea of ‘planning’ conflicts with our experience that reliance on plans can produce rigid behaviour and corresponding brittleness.
We adapt our plans to increase our general preparedness, and adapt our strategy to decrease our reliance on accurate forecasting. This operationalises the ‘serendipity pattern’ described by Merton.
Within an ongoing research and development project.
RECOMMENDER
As the body of content grows, it can be harder to find relevant material or the best collaborators in a global pool: this conflicts with our desire to achieve excellence.
Existing strategies include “scrobbling” audio tracks to Last.fm, or buying recommended products on Amazon. The same ideas can be adapted to FLOSS, research, learning, and other domains.
Within our use of Technologies and materials we could Reduce, reuse, recycle.
DIVERSITY
If we only collaborate within a relatively homogeneous population of people who think like us this conflicts with our desire to find new ideas and new solutions, and to do widely relevant work.
Look out for different contexts in which we can collaborate with different people; they don’t all have to work on one central main project. We recognise that collaboration is easier when we share similar languages and literacies. In cases where collaboration needs to be made tighter, prefer ways of exchanging information and expertise with Newcomers that makes the relationship one of peers rather than a one-way hierarchy.
Within a Project or network.
BACK 5PH1NX pattern + analysis
Catch up with David about Open Source Learning
BACK Peeragogy in action pattern + analysis
BACK SWATS pattern + analysis
BACK SOLE pattern + analysis
BACK A meeting with the Pro Vice-Chancellor pattern + analysis
BACK Collaborative Explorations pattern + analysis
BACK Coworking Story pattern + analysis
Ongoing PAR of the Top level summary!
1. Review the intention: what do we expect to learn or make together?
Present some ‘poetic’ peeragogy progress, and ‘a way in’ to everything we have to offer
When there’s a full draft, pass to Charlie for revision
Keep it up to date and try to ensure that it really does cover everything.
2. Establish what is happening: what and how are we learning?
I created a bunch of Scrum Boards to keep track of tasks and progress within the various ongoing sub-projects
C-c R P C org-scrum-board-peeragogy-course
C-c R P H org-scrum-board-peeragogy-handbook
C-c R P J org-scrum-board-peeragogy-project
C-c R P P org-scrum-board-peeragogy-podcast
C-c R P R org-scrum-board-peeragogy-paper
C-c R P W org-scrum-board-peeragogy-website/technology — Or rather should become different technologies
C-c R P Y org-scrum-board-peeragogy-community
Rough drafts of individual patterns here in Org Mode
Pairing to look at some of these sections with Charlie, Ray, Leo
3. What are some different perspectives on what’s happening?
Concern about the technology: People are excluded “by default” with things like Emacs/Org Mode/Git
Indeed, no matter what tools we are using, some people are excluded
We never had an ‘inclusive platform’ that was productive and working well
At no point was it solving the problems that we want to solve, but we did have “one project at a time where everyone was involved at some level”
Now we have several sub-projects up and running — not everyone needs to be directly involved in every aspect of the project
However, we do need to stay in touch
4. What did we learn or change?
Bringing voice into the mix by reading these things out loud helped to change the contents for the better