Readings: Peers

Here are a couple readings to discuss related to this week's theme of peers:

Philipp Schmidt: The Great Peer Learning Pyramid Scheme.
John Seely Brown and Richard Adler (2008): Minds on Fire. Educause Review.
Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society (Chapter 6: Learning Webs)

Let us know what you think about these, or suggest other papers, videos, articles you found useful in the context of peer learning.

Ira Schorr's "When Students Have Power" is a great book wherein Schorr describes his experience in creating a cooperative, peer learning environment within his community college classroom. The documentation of the process, in particular the description of the stumbling blocks that he and his students encountered as they attempted to upend the traditional teaching/learning paradigm are very insightful.

Hi! Megapequeño it´s agreat idea to peer working.Students will feel free to express their own ideas and listen to each other.Respect and ask for help is really important and challenging.For teenagers it´s difficult to ask for help but kids will learn.

Hello!Do you think Hyperisland has peer work?

I'm so happy to join this program.....I've been working on a virtualy desert for a 5 years...I've been trying to show to my neigborhoods that learning can be different, that our children can enjoy doing it, that our schools are a little bit unuseful...and learning is so amazing!!!!

I started doing architectural workshops for children...and then I found people interested in others models as well as me and we started doing summer schools with meditation, science, and traditional plays, and then we set up a space to make things and share knowledge (we called it “active learning space for children from 0 to 100 years old”)...but we have not much succes...yet.

I thought I was going too far not being a teacher and talking about learning but now I feel more secure to be in the right way.... thanks to Lifelong kindergarten I realize we have created a marketplace without knowing marketplaces....we are working in a sort of peer to peer learning environment without ages distinction and it goes slow but changing models never has been easy

But as I see it, the big problem with peer to peer learning is the current myth around the teacher, the expert, the pdh...our society still believe in a closed and finite knowledge being guaranteed for only an elite. That idea build a more understanding and stable world very far away from the inconsistence and inconvenience of our changing real one.

And there are too many people being left out of the system for low scores and wrong messages ...and this is so unreal...I have met so many of them with high intelligence level without studies.....but as Illich says “consumer resistance increases knowledge industry” and industry is the king.
I like the idea of deschooling society though I don't agree with putting kids to work...I understand the meaning of that but from my point of view it's too much dangerous ...so easy to fall in exploitation or salaries reduction...I mean, why can not our kids be part of our working day? Simply as a kids, letting them seeing us working, repairing, writing or building things......in this way, they would be surrounded by almost the four channels Illich mention: things, models and elders...and perhaps even peers....that could be an appropriate learning environment.....

Finally, although we have against lots of consumer values, a peer to peer learning and virtual environment would overtake the limits of the social belonging....and that's so interesting....on internet we've almost achieved the 4 learning Illich networks...now we need to get physical objects available...we need more marketplaces or mediaLabs around the world...

Yes - I think that is a great description of how children and adults can learn together (and I suspect it actually captures the essence of what Illich is trying to say).

Thanks for sharing @megapequeno - Here is a link to the book http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo3631380.html (I also found a number of reviews / comments - the book seems to have touched a nerve)

The link to the article "Minds on Fire" does not work anymore. Try this link: http://ebookbrowsee.net/gdoc.php?id=1254590&url=b7dc41ffc21f5a244e7e82106645816c&c=1254590

Thanks Vivian!!!

Very interesting reading "Minds on Fire".
Those amazing learning ecosystems are a great opportunity to achieve an equal and passion-based education around the world but at the same time I'm wondering if there won't be an optimal number of members in this communities to make them work properly and if yes what will happen when that number will be reached or passed....the pyramid squeme?....small networks within larger ones?...big and exciting challenge...

Thanks Vivian - I fixed the link to the Educause article.

If you haven't read the article "Minds on Fire", I suggest that you do. There are some great "gems" of thought in the article that really put in words what is happening with this new movement of Social Learning. I've quoted them below for thought and discussion:

-Old paradigm: "I think, therefore I am". New paradigm: "We participate, therefore we are"

-Old: Our attention is on the content. New: Shift to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated.

-Old: “learning about” the subject matter New: “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice.

Don't you think teaching students to be active participants in their chosen Learning Community is added strength to just teaching them content in their chosen career? If we know they are active participants in a learning community, we know they are constantly growing and getting more skills. They are on the pioneering edges of their field, as a result.

It's like the difference between visiting a medical doctor who is an active participant of some online community in his/her field and one who isn't.

Maybe making sure they are active participants in a learning community is enough because it's a given that they will get the necessary content and knowledge while there.

What do you think?

@1L2P. Thanks so much for posting these readings. I just got around to reading them and was quite struck at how well the authors, including yourself, articulated many of my own feelings about teaching and learning. In your article, I liked how you contextualized peer learning within a global context. I think that is a valuable way to think about the ways that peer learning can have a profound effect on the rapidly changing social dynamic brought about by globalization. I also enjoyed your definition of the peer learning pyramid and its scalability. I totally agree with Illich's concept of "bridges to nowhere." I have often pondered the repeated failure of educational reform within the states and come to a similar conclusion. Unless, we change the fundamental conception of and attitude toward learning and knowledge in this country, and move away from an expert-oriented philosophy toward a web of skill exchanges, we will never have educational parity in this country. In Minds on Fire, I especially liked the updating of the Cartesean view of leaning and knowledge from “I think, therefore I am,” to “We participate, therefore we are.”Also great to see the author's reference Polany's concept of tacit and explicit knowledge applied in a peer learning context. Similar to the author's approach, I have attempted to use peer learning in the classroom to assist students in bringing their tacit knowledge to the fore, making it more explicit in the process. Really great and provocative reading.

Thanks for the response @megapequeno - I am glad you enjoyed the readings.

I would be interested to hear more about what you did, and how it played out. Did you give students a conversation protocol, or a shared problem, and did they reflect on the experience afterwards - thinking about how much of our knowledge is tacit and hard to codify or even explain?

I find there is a lot of tacit knowledge (habits and practices) that make someone a successful creative learner or maker. Yet education often focuses on the visible parts of knowledge, the subject matter details or final products. The creative learning spiral is an exception to this.

In particular, I used this approach on two longer-term, collaborative art and research projects that I conducted with Chicago teens at community art centers. In one of these, called CultureSpy, I provided the students with the parameters of the project, but left all other aspects up to them. CultureSpy was a critical participatory action research case study that I conducted with teenage collaborators. The study explored the symbiotic relationship between media conglomeration, marketing and teenage visual cultural production. During the course of the study, participants collected cultural data on their peers employing the same surveillance techniques used by teen correspondents working undercover for marketing agencies. From this data, the participants formulated a profile of contemporary teen culture. The participants then compared their profile of teen culture with representations of teen culture presented in popular media texts marketed specifically to teenagers, including movies, television shows, commercials, magazines, catalogs, Web sites, etc. The participants then expressed their findings in commentaries they produced in the media forms they critiqued: video, audio, photography, and digital/new media art. And lastly the students shared their media commentaries along with written reflections on their experiences as researchers on a website: CultureSpy.com.

As the project unfolded, the students were surprised to find out that their tacit knowledge of teen culture was so valued by marketers. They realized that this tacit knowledge was indeed cultural capital that they should not give away so frivolously to commercial entities. Through this process, their awareness of the value of the capital and its import became quite explicit to them. If you want to find out more about the project, here is a link: http://artplusmedia.net/art+media/researcher.html

Based upon the success of this project, I wanted to take this approach further and co-taught a class with media artist Kerry Richardson, where the students would almost entirely dictate the content of the class and the resulting project. The class, Guerrilla Art Action, was a course designed to introduce secondary students to activist art and street theater; in it, the students collaboratively created and performed a conceptual piece. The students developed “The Committee for Better Labeling,” a satirical organization whose mission is to facilitate snap judgments and promote stereotypes. The students produced packets of stickers that mock the stereotypical labels people assign to one another. These labels were handed out as part of the performance on a busy downtown street in Chicago. The labels and other paraphernalia from the street performance were featured a gallery exhibition in the spring of 2003.

The students in the Guerrilla Art Action class determined the topic of the performance as a group. Kerry and I only instructed them to choose a topic that they believed was important to teenagers, but was relatively unimportant to adults. The process of agreeing on a unified topic was trying for them, as each student drew upon his/her tacit knowledge of a particular socio/cultural topic. But ultimately, they did agree on a topic and proceeded with organizing the art performance. Upon completion, they reflected upon how their tacit knowledge, when made explicit brought them together, and provided a platform for them to engage adults in matters of import. If you would like to see video documentation of the project, you can follow this link: http://artplusmedia.net/art+media/guerilla_art_action.html. I wrote an article about the Guerrilla Art Action project that was published in the Harvard Education Review. It gives a much more detailed explanation of the process through which the students made their implicit knowledge explicit. Let me if you are interested and I can e-mail you a copy.