Relevance

In the beginning, there was PageRank.


 * The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it. A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page. [...] PageRank is a probability distribution used to represent the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. PageRank is a probability distribution used to represent the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. A simplified model of the PageRank value for any page u can be expressed as the sum of  PageRank(v)/L(v) over all v  in the set of pages linking to page u, where L(v) is the number L(v) of links from page v.  The PageRank computations require several passes, called "iterations", through the collection to adjust approximate PageRank values to more closely reflect the theoretical true value.  In practice, the formula uses a model of a random surfer who gets bored after several clicks and switches to a random page.  If a page has no links to other pages, it becomes a sink and therefore terminates the random surfing process. If the random surfer arrives at a sink page, it picks another URL at random and continues surfing again.  When calculating PageRank, pages with no outbound links are assumed to link out to all other pages in the collection. Their PageRank scores are therefore divided evenly among all other pages.   As a result of Markov theory, it can be shown that the PageRank of a page is the probability of being at that page after lots of clicks. [...] A version of PageRank has recently been proposed as a replacement for the traditional Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factor and implemented at eigenfactor.org. Instead of merely counting total citation to a journal, the "importance" of each citation is determined in a PageRank fashion.  A similar new use of PageRank is to rank academic doctoral programs based on their records of placing their graduates in faculty positions. In PageRank terms, academic departments link to each other by hiring their faculty from each other (and from themselves). [...] Google may be moving away from a publicly visible page rank in order to motivate work on content quality by discouraging content farming as a means of boosting a site's reputation. A visible, high rank can inflate the value of a site, and provides useful feedback for paid SEOs that add no value to the system. -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

These days, there are also things like Facebook "like", for conferring appreciation, and Google+ for conferring appreciation while sharing content with a specific group of people. But these do not have a specific "learning" or "adaptivity" orientation.

In further developing paragogy, we could make use of PageRank-like ideas, for example, by determining when people are writing about similar concepts in a content aggregator (like 750words.com or what have you), in order to indicate that these people are "peers". The amount of text that someone contributes that is related to a given topic would confer their "ranking" as an expert on that topic. Expertise could be used for prestige or price-signalling -- and even more importantly, we would quickly recognize that not everyone is an expert on everything, so varied degrees of expertise could be used to build teams (labor consumption or co-consumption bundles).

At a prototyping level, this could all also be done in a simpler and more "discretized" way, just by self-identifying interests and skill level. In this way, people can be peers in the sense of having a common interest, or peers in the sense of additionally having a common skill level related to that interest. Co-learning and working groups could be established with peer learners who will have similar questions about their applied projects, and expert guides who would help with these various projects (presumably for a fee, but possibly also as a volunteer). A current "applied" conversation about these ideas is taking place here: http://campus.ftacademy.org/community/mod/groups/topicposts.php?topic=5944&group_guid=5741

On a deeper level (see recommended reading), these techniques could be used to study and develop adaptive strategies for collaboration and learning. In other words, we can see paragogy as an applied ethnomethodology.

= Recommended Reading =
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomethodology "If one assumes, as Garfinkel does, that the meaningful, patterned, and orderly character of everyday life is something that people must work to achieve, then one must also assume that they have some methods for doing so". That is, "...members of society must have some shared methods that they use to mutually construct the meaningful orderliness of social situations" (Rawls/Garfinkel: 2002:6).