Learning... with peers

"Do you like working with people, or do you like working alone?"

My 17-year-old half sister asked me that question yesterday. I said, "I like working together with other people when I'm working on something that I don't understand very well because it's new for me."

It's of course useful in such a situation if the work colleagues understand the topic better than I do, but even then, if I'm going to do my part I also have to figure out what I can contribute. "Research work" can be a great opportunity for me to learn things, but it's still work, and things still have to get done.

And apart from that fact, one typically learns by doing, and learning with peers is no different. I'm perfectly happy to absorb some information, more or less passively, by myself (TV, comics); but if there's something more interesting going on, I'm going to want to talk to people about about, or do something even more embodied, active, or interactive.

Involvement of other people in a learning process shouldn't be a surprise. People are more or less inherently social, and times when people do things truly on their own would be more the exception than the rule. And yet, the historical standard of what makes "a person" is someone with a high degree of independence (Sherry Turkle); teaching something that could be called "self-sufficiency" is a goal for a lot of degree programs.

And while it makes sense to cultivate these skills, part of being an independent person is being able to relate to other people in a productive way. Without any further elaboration, "learning with peers" could be part of a recipe for all kinds of non-individuation. If a person can always turn to a peer (or teacher) for help, how will they ever learn to do things on their own? It's a reasonably interesting psychological concern, but as everyone who is reading this has been weened and toilet trained, it's not a particularly damning concern.

Indeed, what I've suggested above is that working with peers is one of the best incentives for figuring out how to do one's part. Probably no one likes being needy and dependent all the time (even little kids tend to take pride in being able to help out). When there's a job to be done, social pressures against "freeloading" kick in to motivate people to do work.

The arrangements become interesting and complicated when there are multiple different tasks going on, with different social groups involved. One may have multiple competing motivators (work, family, friends, etc.), which can also become burdensome "obligations" if one isn't careful.

But (going out on a limb a little bit here), in this scenario, it may be possible to change the perspective to look at each of the different domains of life as a "peer" in some abstract sense. Each of these domains of life "gives feedback that wouldn't be there otherwise". As the number of domains grows, things become potentially very complex, and one can get spread a very thin. The idea of working in multiple domains or within multiple spheres of life should somehow be about quality, not merely quantity.

But what is quality? There's been a lot of popular writing on this topic (Pirsig). It may very much be in the eye of the beholder, but this hasn't stopped people from trying to find general patterns (Aristotle). From the point of view of work and learning, quality can as in the previous section be described in terms of outputs (products that satisfy the customer) and means (processes that satisfy the producer).

As discussed in the introduction, a learning process may be fun or boring. For example, I'm imagining that writing a novel with a group of collaborators might be really fun. But it could also be tedious in a lot of ways. The novel might drift all over; it might look more like a collection of short stories, or just a bunch of disconnected fragments. It's not entirely clear that the things that make the process fun (conversations, joking, personal anecdotes) make the product itself a good one. And that can be OK, in a "prosuming" context in which people consume (at least in part) their own experience.

To sum up, life quality does probably have something to do with being an "integrated person", and this in turn has something to do with relating well with others. This has both experiential aspects (which can make an experience fun and which can make it "feel productive") and also "objective" aspects related to products.

I'll mention another recent anecdote. We had a fun Halloween party last weekend, but one of my friends couldn't make it because he was sick. The next day he was feeling a bit better and was over at my house for dinner with another friend (who had been at the party). The three of us were talking about how the party had gone, who was there, and so on -- with the guest who hadn't been there basing all of his remarks on the photos he had seen on Facebook. Consumer experience is, clearly, as subjective a matter as producer experience, and the lines between the two are very often blurred. Although this friend hadn't been at the party at all, he did contribute something to my post-party enjoyment, with an experience that built on the earlier in-person experience.