Peeragogy & a New Culture of Learning (3)
(Link to Part 1, Link to Part 2)
After teaching students face-to-face and online long enough to feel like I knew what I was doing, I decided to push empowerment to the next level by teaching my own courses online co-learning as an explicit learning goal. I used the same Social Media Classroom I used with Berkeley and Stanford students. I didn't want to duplicate work I had already done, so I created new courses: "Introduction to Mind Amplifiers," "Introduction to Cooperation Theory," and "Think-Know Tools." I solicited learners through Twitter and Facebook. Learners paid me $200-300 via PayPal for each 5-6 week course.
In my email to college students, I always used the greeting, "Esteemed Students." For some reason, I wrote "esteemed co-learners" in my first email to my online students. I had introduced the term in my college classes in regard to the goal of forming a co-learning community and getting away from the "banking theory" of education. Just as I had done with my college students, I warned potential co-learners in advance that this course would be more participative than most courses and that they should expect to participate regularly in a variety of media:
Welcome! This course is going to be fun and enriching for those who choose to get involved in doing classwork in new ways. We’re going to experiment. The success of our experiment will depend on our work together as a learning community – in class and online. (Please click and read each link on this page – and ask yourself if you are ready to continue at this level of commitment through the rest of the quarter). Each one of us will be required to work differently than we usually do. Most courses focus on the delivery by a teacher of a specific body of knowledge to students, who are held accountable as individuals for retaining and comprehending that knowledge. In this learning community, we’re going to be inquiring and reflecting more than delivering and memorizing, and we’re going to be thinking, discussing, learning as a group as well as learning individually — we’re going to be both collaborative (working together on projects) and cooperative (co-responsible for each other’s learning). That part alone is going to require more work on your part than you might think.
Participants in my online courses took "co-learner" seriously; this simple nomenclature seems to have a lot of power when reframing a course as participative and cooperative. So I started using the term with my college students, as well. Word-magic appears to be particularly powerful when a teacher and students use it, perhaps because it reminds us that we are exploring beyond the bounds of the educational model we learned in school. Online courses were organized around online texts (a mix of short readings and videos), weekly lecture-discussions using audio, video, chat, and whiteboard, group conversations in forums, individual blog posts with comments, collaborative knowledge creation with wikis (e.g., our lexicon work), and learning activities I decided to call "missions" instead of assignments.
I used a variety of media for our weekly live sessions. I started out with Elluminate, which became Blackboard Collaborate when it was acquired by Blackboard. I liked it because it could easily accomodate dozens of simultaneous users. In addition to audio, video, and chat, Elluminate had a shared whiteboard feature that I found to be almost magical in terms of coalescing a learning community of strangers located on several continents. At the beginning of the first session, I invited everyone to introduce themselves in 30 seconds or less. Then I made the whiteboard available to all and asked co-learners to suggest roles that could transform the session into something more than a lecture with questions and answers. We ended up with a search team of one or two who searched on terms that came up in lecture or discussion and entered the most relevant and useful URLs they found into the chat. A curation team took those URLs, wrote a two or three sentence description of what each one meant in the context of our course, and turned the annotated URLs over to a wikimaster who created a page for that live session and incorporated the curated links, mindmaps we created during the session, a transcript of the simultaneous text chat, along with a link to replay the session with audio, video, slides, chat in real time. We had a lexicon team who kept a list of key words and phrases, then entered them on a wiki page that all of us edited during the following week, adding and improving definitions and links. And a mindmapping team who culled the keywords and phrases down to a few for top-level nodes in the mindmap. During the first session, I lectured using slides to show exactly what media we were going to use and explain how each tool fit into our goal of creating a co-learning community. Then I asked everyone to join in a mindmapping exercise using the whiteboard.
The mindmapping team entered a half dozen of what they considered to be top-level descriptors of my presentation. Then others began adding keywords and drawing connections between nodes, adding illustrations. The magical affordance of Elluminate's whiteboard was that it was anonymous. That is, any one or all of the two or three dozen participants could enter text or images, draw, move elements around, delete elements -- anonymously. The whiteboard did not indicate who made each move. Very quickly, and almost astonishingly, we watched as we turned ourselves into a simple groupmind. After the session, one or two co-learners were invited to volunteer to clean up our brainstormed map and post a cleaned up version. Blackboard, the owner of Collaborate, is the vendor of a proprietary learning management system that doesn't sit right with me, and it was costing me $500/year, so I switched an open-source alternative, Big Blue Button, who were happy to give me an educational account in exchange for posting about my experience. You can see for yourself what the live sessions looked like: Here is an archive of recordings of my Rheingold U live sessions.
After the first session, I used the first minutes to chat with people about their encounters with the syllabus during the week, asked participants to sign up for roles, then I presented a half hour lecture on the syllabus texts and missions for the following week. Then we would blog and post in forums about that week's material, grow out the lexicon, add and comment on mindmaps, share social bookmarks.
One thing I learned after presenting a score of online courses: Good online co-learning requires a critical mass of active participants. If they are active enough, ten people are enough. Fifteen people is better. These are people who actively post in the forums and blogs, add mindmaps, volunteer for co-learning teams, engage with the missions. I found that if I accepted 30 paying co-learners, after warning them multiple times about the requirement for participation and the amount of time that could take, life would intervene with 10 who would drop out, and another 5 would mostly not participate, despite all the warnings and statements of commitment.
I wrote a series of posts for the Digital Media and Learning website, now the site of the Connected Learning Alliance (with more than 100 of my interviews with innovators in digital media and learning) about my online learning experiments:
Pop-up University: https://clalliance.org/blog/pop-up-university/
Learning Reimagined: Participatory, Peer, Global, Online https://clalliance.org/blog/learning-reimagined-participatory-peer-global-online/
Toward Peeragogy: https://clalliance.org/blog/toward-peeragogy/
In my next and final installment, I'll cover the territory I landed in after leaping to the next level of co-learning: learning without a teacher.