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skreutzer
Dec 8, 2019, 10:03:16 AM12/8/19
to Peeragogy
I'm wondering a little about potential strategies for the Peeragogy project. My impression is that the Peeragogy project as some sort of entity/group/organization is the main steward/driver for the theory, methodology and is one of the publishers of the handbook (if nobody else does, it's the job/mission of this project to keep it available and up-to-date as a resource). Sure, any peer can branch/fork off (benefit of customization versus benefit of collaboration/contributions) at any time and this group may even help with such endeavors as part of the broader peeragogical space. However, as one can learn from what's written in the handbook, peeragogy is not just an abstract concept, but describes pretty concrete practices. Therefore, with the preparations for handbook version 4, the reading group, working on book production and the content, aren't these meta-activities for the methodology, while there's the other realm of peeragogical practice that needs work too?
From what I've heard so far, several peers have projects of their own which may deserve registration, analysis, review/evaluation/suggestions/feedback, support and development (crowdsourcing, swarming a different one each month or something) in the Accelerator. Planet Math, Independent Publishers of New England and Uncertainty Principle as a few examples and maybe more I'm not aware of yet. Furthermore, what about an ongoing series of online teaching/co-learning, where any peer could request or offer a topic she/he is interested in teaching or learning, so others could "vote" or join these not just as limited events, but to collect and maintain resources + capacity so others can quickly pick up on the theme and get an introduction, mostly done too as libre-licensed OER (Open Educational Resources) maybe contributing/using Wikibooks or similar existing resources (no need to do everything from scratch)?
Activities like these could be organized in workgroups, one of which could be the technical/IT/data "department"/capacity
another one could be onboarding
to help newcomers to get an overview, register their interests/skills, point them towards the spots they're interested in + offering some handholding, if needed. The "Workscape" chapter lists functions that should be available to a project team, Sam Hahn too has his "9 Artifacts":
For each work group, we may ask and register which tools plug into these slots of the pattern/template, so it becomes easier for each project to get an overview of what's going on and how/where to join/contribute. Some of this may require technical tooling, but there's also plenty of opportunities for curation and content/data work for people who might want to help by filling some of the other roles, and the Peeragogy project itself could reflect and observe these practices on the meta-level to develop the theory and methodology.
In the field of (libre-freely licensed) software development, approaches like the one described above is established for a very long time now (despite the social features aren't necessarily developed well), but less digital domains could make use of peer principles found there, be it for learning/teaching, publishing, media literacy, software tools or other topics. It would be relatively important to maintain some sort of neutrality in order to avoid that one party manages to accumulate unjust privileges over the other peers, but this shouldn't be too difficult given the good and bad examples we can learn from. For example, all data should be open data regardless of what tool is used, so others can make independent use of it, for which subsequently libre-freely licensed tools should be made available and maintained as well.
For non-software-development online collaboration groups, consider the Digital Life Collective:
Their thing is a paid membership for investing into the development and integration of tools (from a members perspective, probably mostly renting the hosting, service and software), so members get access granted to a platform of Mattermost and Federated Wiki instances (and whatever else might get integrated into their platform), also with graph and holon visualizations of projects and activities. Robert Best builds the Open Learning Commons
which in part uses libre-free licenses for some of the published/public learning content/discussions, but the OLC seems to be more on the learning and less on the workgroups side. There are likely similar communities, it might be worth collecting and reviewing them because why start another one from scratch, if there's the option to collaborate or cooperate with an already existing one, or at least learn their good parts and avoid the bad parts.
Douglas Engelbart proposed the ABC model for strategic, systemic, exponential improvement:
which I find highly relevant here. Helping others with what they want to do towards the common good helps them with helping you again, for the pile of good material becoming even better which then attracts more people to make it even better again.
Full disclosure: I personally don't have enough time/capacity/skill and not even too much of interest in building all the stuff that would be needed, but I do believe that a lot of little steps accumulate and working together and collaborating could easily compensate/exceed individual capacity shortages, especially if invested wisely into the strategic meta-improvement that saves everybody from manual or pointless tasks where computers and digital are there to enable new, much better ways to do things, if used properly and for realizing its full potential in our service.
Joe Corneli
Dec 8, 2019, 11:20:27 AM12/8/19
to peer...@googlegroups.com
Stephan, that seems about as close as we have come to a manifesto for the project. Super!
My only doubt at the moment is that the amount of effort involved and the amount of effort available may not match up. Even preparing the Fourth Edition of the handbook will take quite a bit of work. We should not overpromise, nor should we expect more from people than they can realistically give. This of course has something to do with the matter of “incentives“. Let’s be careful how we think about that.
In the patterns paper, we use the metaphor of a university to tie everything together. Let’s consider that the incentives in this case are clearest for people who do not already have access to the benefits that a University provides. Certainly such people exist. (I wonder whether I could possibly do the kinds of work I am interested in within a traditional university, myself.)
And, as we have often discussed in the project, there are other ways to think about it—the University is just one lens or metaphor, other people will see other kinds of benefits.
It seems to me that our task is to make connections with the next generation of participants, for whom the project may be even more valuable than it ever was before. I hope that this will happen, and personally I view the fourth edition of the handbook as a chance to try to forge some of these connections. I hope that we can use your “manifesto“ to help us shape the editorial policy for the fourth ed.
Joe Corneli
Dec 8, 2019, 12:19:57 PM12/8/19
to peer...@googlegroups.com
On Sun, 8 Dec 2019 at 16:20, Joe Corneli <holtze...@gmail.com> wrote:
This of course has something to do with the matter of “incentives“. Let’s be careful how we think about that.
Another angle here, putting our work in context: (From the New York Times):
“Yet scientific knowledge has not produced action equal to the challenge.”
“Reimagining the world economy means turning around a very big ship. Not to mention global buy-in.”
So I am thinking that the long-term goals, the teleological parts of the picture, are pretty clear—it is the smaller steps and as you say strategic thinking that needs more attention.
skreutzer
Dec 8, 2019, 5:26:46 PM12/8/19
to Peeragogy
Completely agree, just wanted to think a little bit about the big picture, and how to potentially bootstrap such activities in an Engelbartian sense, as it's very common to remain stuck with one activity that would require or greatly benefit from the completion of a second activity, which in turn would require or greatly benefit from the completion of the first activity. If the journey eventually happens to lead into the direction of an ongoing (open and/or online?) peeragogical practice, it could help to already design towards it. Don't want to present a vision or picture for "yearning for the vast and endless sea" of my own here, but what I do hear is that the production isn't really actually the only and whole point of peeragogy, but to have and maintain it a foundational step for the broader application of what's written and described in it. The "university" (virtual/abstract or online or physical) can indeed be the institution and organization with students, teachers, faculty, departments, facilities, library, publications, graduation and what not, for both transforming traditional education towards urgently needed, way more digital approaches (both in terms of media competency/literacy, but also that physical classrooms, frontal lecturing about quickly outdating facts nobody can nor needs to memorize any more for passing irrelevant tests) as well as for teaching applied peer principles which aren't well understood nor very popular despite almost everybody is encountering them in some form at some point eventually, leaving the majority in deep confusion about this digital computers and networks thing, just like it took quite a long time during the industrial revolution to eventually figure out what the steam engine might mean for society, business, work, and all the rest. Why wait another 100-300 years if a university could educate about these questions starting right now?
So in case new people arrive here who want to work on particular aspects, why not create some spaces for them and help them to some extend, if such activities can still somehow be coordinated and eventually integrated, while on the other hand I completely agree that it might make most sense strategically to not divert capacity/attention and instead focus/concentrate on the preparation of version 4 of the handbook. In any case, listening/watching to all the old Peeragogy videos, my impression is anyway that you guys have all of this figured out already for ages (granted that watching these videos consecutively provides a very condense overview, not spread out with a week between each session), so from this background, it appears as another push/attempt/go at continuing the practice and keep it improving. For myself, I'm currently most interested in making the book build/generate again as a precondition to even remotely become a candidate for doing further things with/for it as a resource. But that's just my own little workgroup branch there – over and out :-)
Charles Blass
Dec 8, 2019, 6:38:32 PM12/8/19
to Peeragogy
(also posted at keybase)
the idea of opening up a broader awareness of and participation in the process and content of updating the handbook into the fourth edition represents the nexus between the official
public version and the next living wave of peeragogy, whilst embodying the meta aspects and living patterns of peeragogical practice and community.
as such, it is this collective effort that could be identified as “daoable” - which could be extended as an invitation - essentially onboarding - into the process as well as the product.
A product which is never “complete” but can be clearly indicated as to status, version etc.
A process which takes place in various channels on various platforms, and which can be broken down into evaluable chunks, while not ignoring the inherent complexity of dynamic overlapping and cross-networking between multiple dimensions and patterns within peeragogy at large.
In other words:
We can invite people out there to the peeragogy party, and make available version 4.0 (or 3.9) in advance of being “fully worked out”; and further that the various tasks and roles involved can be quantified - roughly but hopefully adequately at first as a starting point - and valuated within a system we co-design, to attribute reputation and rewards at least/first symbolically until a satisfactory token economics could be devised as well as dealt with from regulatory perspectives.
Such utility tokenization would take us very far, I believe, in laying the groundwork for establishing an economy of peeragogy.
the idea of opening up a broader awareness of and participation in the process and content of updating the handbook into the fourth edition represents the nexus between the official
public version and the next living wave of peeragogy, whilst embodying the meta aspects and living patterns of peeragogical practice and community.
as such, it is this collective effort that could be identified as “daoable” - which could be extended as an invitation - essentially onboarding - into the process as well as the product.
A product which is never “complete” but can be clearly indicated as to status, version etc.
A process which takes place in various channels on various platforms, and which can be broken down into evaluable chunks, while not ignoring the inherent complexity of dynamic overlapping and cross-networking between multiple dimensions and patterns within peeragogy at large.
In other words:
We can invite people out there to the peeragogy party, and make available version 4.0 (or 3.9) in advance of being “fully worked out”; and further that the various tasks and roles involved can be quantified - roughly but hopefully adequately at first as a starting point - and valuated within a system we co-design, to attribute reputation and rewards at least/first symbolically until a satisfactory token economics could be devised as well as dealt with from regulatory perspectives.
Such utility tokenization would take us very far, I believe, in laying the groundwork for establishing an economy of peeragogy.
Joe Corneli
Dec 9, 2019, 1:54:45 AM12/9/19
to peer...@googlegroups.com
Hi Charles,
I have not filled in the DAO canvas that you pointed us to a while ago, but I have printed out a copy on paper and will try later today. I am wondering how the ‘quantifiable’ dimension relates to co-op models, specifically this classic description:
One of the facets of this co-op model is to promote education, so it’s pretty easy in that direction to see how peeragogy would fit in. Going the other way, if we think about our investments in the peeragogy project as a sort of “intellectual capital“, that starts to develop a link. At the same time though I don’t know if it is easy to quantify these contributions: it’s not as if more words added to the handbook makes it better, and it’s not necessarily clear that more hours spent always translates into clear benefits for the community. Of course we hope time and effort will indeed have benefits for all of us and I do think that that is the trend. Also, rather than democratic control via voting, we have a kind of democratic control via the freedom to edit.
The benefits for a “downstream“ readership who does not choose to give back are less clear simply because we don’t have, in the most extreme case anyway, any signal whatsoever on how they are using the material. However, again there is some evidence that people do find this stuff useful, for example if we look inside of Google scholar.
If we go with the university as a metaphor, then probably some of their preferred metrics would carry over, things like percentage of alumni in paid employment for example.
Looking at the Rochdale principles, it does seem to me that peeragogy could add a lot for co-ops particularly in terms of the collaboration between different co-ops. So I would think of them as one likely “public” that we could be addressing usefully. Most people I think are more familiar with food co-ops than with other arrangements, such as electricity co-ops. What you say about an economy of peeragogy would seem to me to be already present within the cooperative Economy, through their meta- co-op principal, but not 100% explicit.
If we switch and look at other online peer learning communities, like Stack Exchange, maybe this will help us understand some of the abstract lines of our model, and any unique contributions of the peeragogy project as well.
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Lorenz Sell
Dec 9, 2019, 4:22:11 PM12/9/19
to Peeragogy
Joe - I think you bring up some really important points around my own challenges with a DAO like structure. In that, everything needs to be broken down to an almost machine like understanding and measurement of what value added means. It seems difficult to quantify more intangible contributions and interactions.
I think that decentralized teams working together need to learn how they will work together and in this sense a set of Peeragogy inspired patterns might be beneficial. It's easy to assume that the way people will work together is obvious, but this is an incredibly nuanced territory that there is no one size fits all answer for. This could be particularly relevant for DAO style organizations and a way to bring a meaningful human factor to the equation. In my opinion, the technical implementation should be secondary to the human factors of meaningful connection and constructive dialogue. Peeragogy as a process for learning about what there is to learn about and then learning about that makes a lot of sense to me in this context.
Roland Legrand
Dec 11, 2019, 3:39:30 AM12/11/19
to Peeragogy
Diglife is mentioned here as a possible platform for developing peeragogy-activities. Would it be interesting to have a special session exploring Diglife? Also,why not discuss sutra.co during that same session?
Lorenz Sell
Dec 11, 2019, 12:15:50 PM12/11/19
to Peeragogy
I'd love to hear more about DigLife and I'd be happy to present Sutra.
Roland Legrand
Dec 11, 2019, 12:34:31 PM12/11/19
to Peeragogy
That's great. Some Tuesday at the beginning of January?
Joe Corneli
Dec 11, 2019, 12:42:51 PM12/11/19
to Peeragogy
Maybe we could invite someone from this organisation along as well, and make it a round-table. They seem to be doing something a bit related:
Joe Corneli
Dec 11, 2019, 7:06:54 PM12/11/19
to peer...@googlegroups.com
Here, for example, is a coop that focuses on facilitation:
Lorenz Sell
Dec 12, 2019, 10:24:43 AM12/12/19
to Peeragogy
How's Tuesday January 7th?
Roland Legrand
Dec 12, 2019, 10:35:44 AM12/12/19
to Peeragogy
Seems fine to me!
On Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 4:24:43 PM UTC+1, Lorenz Sell wrote:
On Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 4:24:43 PM UTC+1, Lorenz Sell wrote:
How's Tuesday January 7th?
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