Offer


 * The theory of paragogy was developed in the context of two online courses that we ran at Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) in Autumn of 2010. One of the courses was called "DIY Math", and it was "designed  to build independent study and peer-support skills for mathematics learners at all levels."  The other course was called "Collaborative Lesson Planning", and it was built around the question "Can publishing and collaboratively building lesson plans online make them better?"  The first course was not such a resounding success, but we learned a lot from it anyway, especially in a rich discussion about how it could be improved that took place in the second course.  The key outcome was an outline of an analytical framework that applies to peer-to-peer or peer-based teaching-and-learning-between-equals.  The difficulties with DIY Math pointed to possible improvements at the organizational level, such as developing a P2PU-wide "social contract", or only running courses when sufficient commitments had been "anted up".  The post-mortem analysis of DIY Math suggested that the concept of pedagogy is not sufficient in the peer-based learning context.

He trains like this: contemplating cessation I will breathe in, he trains like this: contemplating cessation I will breathe out.

We can look for places and ways in which paragogy is not just a good idea, but a descriptive theory. The five principles are a nice way to spell something out, but what's more important is to look at what really happens when peers learn together. For example, peers might learn to take over some function that had previously been run by a centralized authority, particularly when this central authority has not been doing a particularly good job. They might learn how to present themselves honestly both in terms of what they're after, and what they have to offer, and in other respects as well. Through interactive hands-on experience, they might decide that certain tasks or responsibilities aren't enjoyable, and that others are. We could be talking about a lot or sometimes just a little experience -- but whether we're talking about a lifetime of negotiations, or a day on the job, peer learning can help individuals build self-understanding, and also help them develop together ways to communicate about the potential exchanges and collaborations they can make together.

But paragogy isn't just a theory of one-to-one exchanges or transactions: it is also a theory of externalities. As people engage in exchange behavior, there are side-effects that run all over the place. The stakeholders to these "downstream effects" may well be "peers", even if they are not party to the original conversation. (E.g. Wikipedia is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.")

We can look for ways to allow downstream users to communicate with each other and add additional value to the system through these communications. What we might hope to see is an end to dogma, whether that means "the customer is always right" or "the producer is always right", as the system becomes "marketized", bringing in additional conversations and resources.

It would be foolish to think that every object, every transaction, can be fully understood, that all externalities can be internalized. Indeed, the practice of paragogy works at least as much by putting things out there than it does by synthesizing and combining ideas!

Learning to do this in a way that allows us to cultivate "That quality of wisdom that all the wise wish, and call creative qualities, and good creation of the mind" seems a reasonable way to encapsulate our hopes for paragogy. As multiple conversations and viewpoints are brought to bear, knowledge systems improve, not just at the "container" level (i.e. more knowledge), but at the level of their articulation as well.

He trains like this: contemplating letting go I will breathe in, he trains like this: contemplating letting go I will breathe out.

In the end, paragogy could be "just another buzzword", or it could become a real practical philosophy. To "realize the dream and then wake up" suggests that we should discard the impractical aspects of paragogy. As we've stated elsewhere, there are often times when pedagogy or andragogy will work better for a given goal.

And yet, there are times and places where those social technologies do not work so well, and examining them was our goal in this project. People frequently learn as peers.

We shouldn't just ask just conceptual questions like "Who are peers?" or "What is learning?", but practical ones like "Who are the peers now?", "What is adaptive for the current situation?". Quite frequently, something is "learned" by identifying a pattern and learning how recognize other instance that fit the pattern. Once this is done, you can move beyond the (centralized) "training data" -- it's literally like taking the training wheels off of a bicycle.

In the same way, this month of writing in the paragogy.net book is shortly coming to a close. We've had a chance to generate a lot of content, but the practice of working on the book, everything is likely to change. I expect that we will gradually smooth out the text to make it more readable, getting rid of bits that are too obscure or too tedious for whatever reason. This editing process will take some time and trust!

This is similar to the way in which you would find any group of people creating their social environment (see the recent book "Bubbles" by Sloterdjik). It's curious that writing -- putting your ideas out there by doing introspection and figuring out what the ideas actually are -- often comes first. Or at least it seems to.

In fact, we have been through this cycle a few times before -- writing, critiquing, revising. In each iteration we have to be ready to let go of the result and allow other people to decide, "is this any good". Eventually we may have to let go of the paragogy project as a whole -- but we will hopefully see it in other good hands by that time.

=Recommended Reading=


 * http://www.amazon.com/Bubbles-Spheres-Microspherology-Semiotext-Foreign/dp/1584351047