[peeragogy-handbook] Foreword by Howard Rheingold

[Joe Corneli]

SUMMARY COMMENTS

Howard’s Foreword was written in 2014, so it predates v3.  Perhaps it
can be edited into the mix for the (planned) 2020 Winter School, and
brought up to date thereby.

I’d say that since this is the first thing that people encounter in the
book, it would be ideal if it gave the itinerary of the guided tour that
will be delivered in the Introduction.

Some content that could be reused: Howard made some interesting comments
about peeragogy in a more recent video:
https://youtu.be/dHvGIX2Wjss?t=138

He also made some interesting comments about his experience as a school
student in one of the Cicolab recordings that we might find and
transcribe.

Other things that the foreword might touch on:

CASE STUDIES

Key questions that people are going to ask: "What is Peeragogy useful
for? How are people using the Peeragogy Handbook?"

So far we have fewer examples of people using the handbook than we’d
like, but there are plenty of examples of peeragogy in the wild.

Charlie: What stories can we use? p2pu? Open street map? Saylor?
Wikipedia? StackOverflow?

The current case study chapters are:

4. Case study: 5PH1NX
8. Case study: SWATs
12. Case Study: P2P SOLE
13. Case Study: A meeting with the PVC
17. Case Study: Collaborative Explorations

Naturally, of course, there’s the Peeragogy Project itself — that should
be an easy one for us to write.

"MAKING OF": SMC, GOOGLE+, GOOGLE GROUPS

We probably don’t need links to historical materials — but in principle
we could include some screenshots or stills (e.g., from the UCB talk or
other videos).  Any links that are included should be moved footnotes,
so they show up in the print version.  (The Wraps provide an example of
good style.)

TRANSLATIONS

We haven’t kept up with the translations; we may not need to cover them
here.  Existing partial translations should be indexed alongside the
recommended reading.

Roland: Interesting to see how the book gets summarized in
translation...

LINKS TO CC ZERO LICENSE AND WAIVER

This should be included b/c it introduces people to the "signup flow" to
become contributors right away!

SUMMARY OF OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS FROM HOWARD

Howard already offer to let us use some of his patreon articles, so we
should find them, and include them, and probably include a short summary
here.

AUDIENCE/PUBLIC

The foreword should maybe start to get people used to the idea that this
book doesn’t have an "audience" so much as a "public" (here I’m
paraphrasing Howard in a somewhat extreme way!) — i.e., of course there
will be things that someone can achieve by reading and using the content
of the book — but in the Peeragogy project that’s actually secondary to
the process of collecting best practices for “peer to peer learning”.
This can be unclear if too many of the chapters link to work inside
institutions (students and teachers).  Certainly most of the heavy
lifting can be done inside the Introduction — the Foreword just needs to
convince people to keep reading and start to think about getting more
involved.  The fact that this is a new/different way of working might be
sufficiently interesting for some people.

MAPPING PROCESS

Vitor: if we had a mapping process, in every country or city where we
have a peeragogy style project, we could map out where the different
peer learning groups are internationally.  Maybe use some social network
tools to recommend people.

This is a good idea and we’re only now getting around to doing a survey
of people who signed up for the mailing list (and maybe some others).
This could connect with a "big data" approach to Peeragogy: imagine if
it was much easier to find people to learn and collaboarte with.  As
such, this suggestion is in a similar ethos to the Whole Earth
catalogue, i.e., mapping what’s actually going on.  Maybe Howard could
touch on this.  (Better if we have some preliminary results to share.)
This could also touch on the "incubator" ideas that Vitor has been
working on.  There are some other contemporary (Jan. 2020) efforts at
"mapping" so we let’s not duplicate effort.  But, we might have some
different/useful perspectives to share.

Charles: What are the tasks, what are the values involved?  E.g.,
freelance, play, time, effort.

Robert: Handbook as a commons.

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY

One discussant commented that "people will be interested in peer
learning, but scared by technology."  We also remarked that our
technology choices "don’t have to be mutually exclusive -- someone who
wants to look at Federated Wiki doesn’t have to scare someone using
Google Docs or Zoom."

-- 
Dr Joseph A. Corneli (https://github.com/holtzermann17)

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