FTGSeedProject

=My Project Idea=

The Paragogy Project

Name
Pæragogy.edu

Group
Paragogy.net (http://paragogy.net) and the Peeragogy team (http://peeragogy.org)

One Line Summary
We would like to build a distributed platform for peer learning.

What is the proposed solution?
We started with 5 principles that describe "best practices" for learning without teachers but with peers. We have since contributed to building an array of additional advice on this topic. But what we want to do next is work in contact with many different groups that are trying this, offering our services as mentors, consultants, and of course peer learners. Our aim will be to support the creation of a distributed platform for peer learning (imagine a university built out of many parallel eternal MOOCs).

How will you make the change?
We recently submitted a workshop proposal to e/merge 2012 in which we plan to walk through the four main sections of the Peeragogy Handbook, and out of which we plan to write a paper that connects paragogy with the spirit of ubuntu. We also contributed to a related workshop proposal for Open Knowledge Festival 2012.

After running these small-scale experiments, our plan over the next year will be to scale this up to the "massive" level, with the goal of building "version 1.0" of peeragogy.edu (which will thenceforth be a self-sustaining venture).

What is your value proposition?
We can accordingly help new or existing groups work better in collaborations.

Why is this different from other offerings?
First of all, unlike many teachers and "executive coaches", we are making everything we learn available to the public domain, so that others can learn from and build upon our work. Our aim is to help compile great resources and help build great learning communities.

Secondly, we combine peer learning with peer production. Participants in this project are end users of the project. As participants come and go, our present-focused approach allows us to build to last.

=Team: bio, expertise, and role(s) in the group=

Member 1
Joe Corneli, co-Director of PlanetMath.org, and Ph. D. candidate at the Knowledge Media Institute

Member 2
Charlie Danoff, Owner of Mr. Danoff's Teaching Laboratory, an educational publishing and services firm

=Stage of the venture=

Date of founding
paragogy.net : Late 2010 peeragogy.org : January 2012

Milestones achieved

 * published or contributed to 4 papers on this topic
 * published 1 "art book" exploring the ideas
 * contributed to a handbook offering practical advice on the topic

Milestones yet to be achieved

 * workshop at e/merge
 * workshop at Open Knowledge Festival
 * building a sustained version of this "workshop"

=Support required=

Who else do you need on your team to make the project a success?
We have a MediaWiki instance which has been sufficient for 2 people, and a Wordpress site that is sufficient for about 20 contributors. But we will need to use some more sophisticated software if we are going to scale things up.

And, more importantly, IF we're going to scale things up -- we need people!

Note also that we don't yet have a concrete "business model" (apart from a generic idea about "consulting"), so we might ourselves benefit from working with a consultant who can help us figure out a good business model.

What in general would you do with funding or volunteer support?
Volunteers have been contributing to the Peeragogy Handbook. However, a sustained effort with more volunteers seems to require a different tack.

In a sense, what we are talking about is building a "meta-commons" of commons-based projects, and a way for contributors to flag up an issue from within any contributing project. Some version of this could be done on the blog-/tweet-o-sphere, but that is locked into a specific collaboration layer without any particular "learning theory" supporting it. (OK, "connectivism"... but does that really work for our purposes?)

Part of our effort will go into building a better way to do meaningful inter-project collaboration. Many individual projects would have a need for money or volunteers, and we're not particularly different in this regard! For the moment, we would emphasize directing funding towards platform work.

Eventually we would also like to direct funding to contributing members based on added value within the system (cf. the "Milieu project" chapter of the Paragogy book).

=Market and Competitors=

Quantify the market (if possible).
Many organizations provide "educational services". There are also a lot of free platforms and experiences to have on the internet, some of these are "educational". Building ways for people to add value in this space is actually pretty tough (particularly when we think about how to set up ways for people to charge for their services).

Our best hope for building a market for tutoring services is to actively engage the tutors in improving their skills as well.

Specify your target niche (my target is "any Internet user" is not an answer)
Our "target niche" is comprised of peer learners. We don't want to preach to the non-converted. But within this niche, we are specifically interested in working with people who are interested in exploring strategy, making change within their organizations and communities. This is where we feel we can add value.

=A few numbers=


 * 2010: 2 (us)
 * 2011: 3 (us and Alex)
 * 2012: 16 (the Peeragogy project)
 * 2013: 64?