[peeragogy-handbook] Introduction

[Joe Corneli]

OVERALL COMMENTS

We’ve discussed using Lisa’s introduction, available in the Peeragogy
Starter Pack,
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2JZhpkrYYKknpJSSJgz23PPYxI31Cu1eWvw8I9ZraM/edit#heading=h.m04zfefgpa67
— or one based on it — so these comments on the v3 intro should be
cross-checked against that one.

OPENING QUOTE/SENTENCE

As with a preface, we don’t need an opening quote.  It’s kind of cute to
have a statement that seems to sum up the book in one sentence — but why
not make our own statement rather than stealing someone else’s?

It’s also worth reflecting on this any time we use quotes in the text.
When exactly do we need someone’s specific voice, and when do we need a
general neutral editorial voice?

The idea that I got from a video shared by Stephan is that that the
writing should offer value for the reader.

Perhaps we want to share that there "is" some
confusion/challenge/struggle — but we don’t want to engage the user in
becoming confused right now.  Ideally we would collect a bunch of great
first sentences, and learn from them.

Just for example, here’s one that got cut:

 “In Westminster, where temples, meeting houses, conventicles, &
 steeples of all kinds are congregated together, there is at all hours &
 halfhours, a round of bells, correcting each other, asseverating that
 time has come a little earlier, or stayed a little later, here or
 here.”

It was replaced with:

  “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Woolf wasn’t showing her hand in the first sentence, but I suppose this
is a reasonable summary of the *plot* of the book.  In the version that
was cut, Woolf was trying to create a little summary of the *meaning* of
the book.  The problem is, that’s inevitably going to be a distortion.

FIRST PARAGRAPH

If we want the book to correspond with an online interaction, maybe we
should include the ‘sign up flow’ in the first paragraph?  This would
move us from thinking and talking an *abstract* user experience, to
thinking and talking about a *concrete* user experience.

We’ve been thinking about how to do this within the 2020 Winter School,
so that gives a “minimum viable” example.  But, we should diagram out
what the workflow is, beyond just “sign up for a mailing list”.

E.g., telling people to sending an email to
subscribe+peeragogy-handbook at lists.peeragogy.org is *super simple*.

That said, the idea of having a Choose Your Own Adventure style
introduction could fit with this, suggesting that multiple people could
have different sign-up flows and different overall experiences.  Maybe
rather than telling people what their experience will be, the
introduction to the book should *help them build a design* for their
experience.  That’s similar to the feedback we got on the Oslo talk.

Just as an example, the Reading Group turned out to be a useful part of
the workflow for v3, but this wasn’t mentioned as a plan inthe
introduction and we only figured out that it would be useful a few years
after publication.

COMPARISON WITH PEDAGOGY

This is tough.  I think we’re somewhat undermined by the association of
‘peeragogy’ with ‘pedagogy’, though of course that was the whole point
of the term.  What’s more, ‘paragogy’ has the same association, and very
few people will get the pun in Greek (even native speakers of Greek).

Lisa has remarked that it’s a bit annoying to define peeragogy by what
it’s not (e.g., non-hierarchical); similarly, defining it by its
contrast with pedagogy hardly does it justice.

I think a better approach is embedded in the Futures paper, where we
didn’t even use the term peeragogy, but (as Hermano pointed out)
peeragogy — anonymised — was nevertheless ‘the answer’ to the questions
we were asking in the paper.  Could we distill a definition from that
text, and then say “we call this ‘Peeragogy’”?

Notice as well that if we *demonstrate* Peeragogy in the first section,
e.g., by helping people build up their own ‘experience flow’, then we’re
*operationalizing* the definition, not just presenting some bit of dry
theory.

Lisa’s introduction probably does the job with a ‘light touch’ (let’s
check separately how she does this).

If we want to talk about Pedagogy, maybe we could use this pull quote:

Neil: Pedagogy is really focused on 'teaching children'. Teaching
children doesn't necessarily involve knowledge transfer (although it
can). Moreover KT occurs within a peeragogy (someone in a peer group
might transfer their knowledge to a peer). To me, peeragogy is learning
without a (obvious) facilitator or 'learning for people who prefer not
to be taught.'

Another point we’ve discussed recently is that we’re not saying that
peeragogy is the best method for everything.

Joe: Somewhere on the edge of the map there could even be pointers to
texts on pedagogy or andragogy, or whatever, for people for whom that
might be a better bet.

APPLICATIONS OF PEERAGOGY AND APPLICATIONS OF THE PEERAGOGY PROJECT

Neil: Peeragogy is very widely used in design and art studio
teaching. It just isn't (as yet) called peeragogy in such a context.

Charlotte: Peeragogy is everywhere! We've often said that we didn't
discover it or invent it, maybe just surfaced it in some cases.

I think this is one place where we need to get clearer about *what we
offer*.  We’re talking about something that’s pretty much ubiquitous
(and not just the specialist topic of an academic discipline) and maybe,
on some level — in light of Larry McEnerney’s “Problem of the Problem” —
we are saying: most of you are doing it wrong!

Of course, we’re not trying to do this in a snide or dismissive way.
But if we want to get people’s attention, in the McEnerney school of
writing, we need to say something like this.  And it needs to be true.
And we need to have something on offer that’s better or more healthy.
(Cf. Hemingway on ‘crap detection’.)

I don’t think we need to ‘sell’ people on peeragogy!  If it’s
ubiquitous, they already know what it is.  And (per Lisa) they may also
have established views on it.  What we *do* need to sell them on is the
effort that will be involved in reading the book.

ESPECIALLY (BUT NOT EXCLUSIVELY) ONLINE

Again, we have another chance not just to ‘market’ the book but to
actually show people what we’re talking about.

We don’t need to *tell* them that "the Peeragogy Handbook is a
compendium of know-how for any group of people who want to co-learn any
subject together" — they already have it in their hands!  We need to
somehow ‘figure out’ (in what is, in the print edition, a paper-based
computation that they can run themselves) what it is they are interested
in learning, and how to help them learn it.

Of course, we’re not *just* writing for print, and if we want to make
claims about what people can do online, let’s make some of them
concrete.  Signing up for a mailing list *might* be almost enough, if
that mailing list is going to have the right kind of conversations on
it.

In my experience, these conversations about about building something
together, rather than arguing about things together, or about promoting
personal viewpoints.  We could point to lots of examples where this
happens, some where it works well, and some where it doesn’t work so
well.

OUR COMMUNITY

Even though we’re now talking about the introduction to the Handbook, we
should, as editors and contributors, *also* be talking about how to make
the community *more* vibrant.  One starting point is to acknowledge the
places and ways in which it *is* vibrant already!

Recently we were talking about how the text at the top of peeragogy.org
often fails to serve its purpose.  I guess people get lost in the
details, and a visual interaction would be better?  Apart from lovely
graphics (I can imagine Amanda doing an amazing job with them) one thing
that’s missing is a ‘map’ of what goes on in the community.

Part of this is a depiction of the goals that haven’t been realized yet.

HOW TO USE THE HANDBOOK: POINTER TO SYLLABUS/SYLLABI

The idea that people would read this book together with an existing
group is kind of nice, but what about lonely people who haven’t found a
group yet?  Or, who are working with people who aren’t likely to want to
spend the time reading this book?

Since we’ve written a few different syllabi now, I guess we have several
(competing? collaborating?) ideas of how people might use the Handbook.
However, per the comments about pedagogy above, we have usually been
writing for a classroom setting, rather than, e.g., and enterprise
setting.  So, it’s cool that we’re talking about “Peeragogy in Action”
on the podcast, but wouldn’t it be better if we were coming up with some
‘syllabi’ together with different groups, remixing contents (like we did
with the Berkeley syllabus) and thinking about how to solve different
problems?  Let’s keep in mind that we don’t need to have all the answers
in the Handbook, just some methods (and even pointers to methods) that
work.  Charlie’s P2PU course comes to mind as something we could point
to that would help people write or find materials to remix.

PROJECT VS HANDBOOK

Neil: I really like the way that peeragogues can get involved in
developing the Handbook and join the community. However, it's just as
important that the Handbook be openly available for people who want to
use or adapt it to their own ends without feeling that they have to join
the community to do so. Not everyone wants to be part of the community
that produce the Handbook (they have their own communities already
perhaps) and feeling that they might be obligated to do so could put off
potential lurker peeragogues. I supposed I'm saying I'd be wary of
generating a gift debt obligation.

Joe: Let’s try to anticipate, what the possible Nextep’s [next steps]
for people from this point are. Only a few will want to remix or join, I
think.

(I included the typo because I’m imagining people binge-watching the
Peeragogy Handbook!  ‘Passive’ media consumption is certainly popular;
and the other thing to consider here is whether it’s actually more
active.  One could imagine the passivity of someone sitting on the couch
watching TV as being a kind of ‘asceticism’, in a way that Sloterdijk
would recognise.)

Anyway, yes.  It’s not a ‘gift’ if we’re just parasitically using the
readers.  Maybe there’s another dimension *beyond* Gift Culture that we
should be thinking about.

E.g., consider architecture...

« that uses the Official City as a “growing platform and energy source,
where to attach itself like a parasite and from where to leach the
electricity and water... [The Instant City's] illegal urban farms or
night markets is so widespread and deep rooted in the Taiwanese culture
and cityscape that we could almost speak of another city on top of the
“official” Taipei, a parallel city – or a para-city.” »

 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruin_Academy#Research_Topics

And of course we started as something para-, too.  So, more to think
about here I’d say.

At one extreme, we could even set things up so that anything to do with
“the project” is saved for one final chapter or epilogue, a bit of a
magician’s trick.

SCRAPBOOK SHOULD GO

Anyway, certainly we don’t want the introduction to be about ‘airing our
dirty laundry in public’.

Joe: The reader wants to find a solution for a problem.  For example,
organize some kind of peer to peer learning thing.  They just want a
solution for the things that they are trying to accomplish.

HOW TO ACTIVATE OUR COMMUNITY

One thought would be to include an open invitation for readers to come
on the podcast!

WHAT IS THE BOOK USEFUL FOR?

Neil: I think the way that artists/designer's books have approached this
is to see the book a repository of learning tools or "probes" rather
than as a slate for writing. The kind of books I'm thinking of often
contain game parameters, pieces/avatars or playing cards that can be
activated in a physical or online learning space. The ludic element is
very important to learning (people learn more effectively through play)
and my experience of peeragogy is that participation is intensified if
there is a ludic component present.

We’ve had more of a dip into “play” concepts recently, so I think we
could certainly be in a position to rethink the entire book/project as a
kind of game.  We might start with things like the patterns.

WORKFLOW

(Although we don’t need to belabour the long gap between this edition
and the previous one, we should have a think about the workflow for the
5th edition at some point.)

TRANSLATIONS

Again, they should be findable, but they don’t need to go in the
introduction.  Maybe back-cover text?

WHAT’S THE VISION

v3: But even more important than a business model is a sense of our
shared vision, which is why we’re working on a “Peeragogy Creed” (after
the Taekwondo creed, which exists in various forms...)

Let’s revisit the creed — and also the Community Guidelines.  They
function as a kind of ‘introduction’ to the mailing list (assuming
people read them) and they may have some more juice when it comes to
introducing peeragogy things.


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

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