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Peeragogy.org

on Sun, 12/30/2012 - 10:50

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With YouTube, Wikipedia, search engines, free chatrooms, blogs, wikis, and video communication, today’s self-learners have power never dreamed-of before. What does any group of self-learners need to know in order to self-organize learning about any topic? The Peeragogy Handbook is a volunteer-created and maintained resource for bootstrapping peer learning.

This project seeks to empower the worldwide population of self-motivated learners who use digital media to connect with each other, to co-construct knowledge of how to co-learn. Co-learning is ancient; the capacity for learning by imitation and more, to teach others what we know, is the essence of human culture. We are human because we learn together. Today, however, the advent of digital production media and distribution/communication networks has raised the power and potential of co-learning to a new level.

If you want to learn how to fix a pipe, solve a partial differential equation, write software, you are seconds away from know-how via YouTube, Wikipedia and search engines. Access to technology and access to knowledge, however, isn’t enough. Learning is a social, active, and ongoing process.

What does a motivated group of self-learners need to know to agree on a subject or skill, find and qualify the best learning resources about that topic, select and use appropriate communication media to co-learn it?  In particular, what do they need to know about peer learning?

This handbook is intended to answer these questions, and in the process, build a toolbox for co-learning.

Our experience within this project has been that flattened hierarchies do not necessarily mean decisions go by consensus. The handbook is in part a collaboration and in part a collection of single-author works. Often the lines and voices are blurred. One constant throughout the book is our interest in making something useful. To this end, the book comes with numerous activities, and is available under non-restrictive legal terms (you can reuse portions of it however you see fit it has been given a CC Zero 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication). For those who seek more evidence-based, scholarly scaffolding for learning practices, we also maintain a literature review of learning theories that pertain to self-organized peer learning.

Finally, we also include instructions on how to join us in further developing this resource.

Sincerely,
The Peeragogy Team