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First in a series on collaborative learning environments. Please visit the website for the livestream replay & to post your questions & experiences!
In this episode, we discuss discussing collaborative learning projects with education innovators and Peeragogy members Steve Yost and Karl Hakkarainen, who share their experiences in collaborative learning in the hopes of catalyzing new conversations and new collaborations. "Whether learning for work or for personal interest, we need ways to entangle our ideas with others who are on the same journey. Learning is rarely a solitary experience. We need to share what we’ve learned in order to make it complete," says Karl.
IN THE BOOTH:
- HOST: Joe Corneli, Oxford Brookes University & the Peeragogy Project
- CREW: Charlie Danoff, Charlotte Pierce, Ray Puzio, Mary Tedeschi
EPISODE LINKS:
What does Peeragogy mean to you? Join the discussion on Mondays at 9 am UTC -5 (US Eastern Time) & join our Google Group (links at peeragogy.org).
Creators & Guests
Host
Host
Designer
What is Peeragogy In Action?
Welcome to The Peeragogy in Action podcast, your no-longer-missing guide to peer learning and peer production! This podcast of the Peeragogy Project (peeragogy.org) provides an interactive space where our audience and active participants can explore and present the philosophies, concepts, tools, and practical applications of non-hierarchical learning and production from colleagues and peers in all walks of life. Produced collaboratively under a CC0 license. Live-streamed via video to YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn; distributed to all major audio podcast apps.
environments today and we're joined by Carl and Steve I'll introduce them
0:11
briefly you can see them there up on screen, Charlotte is behind the
0:17
scenes making this this all happened so Karl Hakkarainen has been an instructor
0:24
at the Worcester Institute for senior education which is otherwise known as wise for more than a decade teaching
0:33
courses on technology history law and the social sciences he retired from a long career in high
0:39
tech and journalism and his grandchildren still ask him for help with their tech gadgets so I'll be very
0:45
interested to learn about whys I hadn't ever heard of it uh before uh before I
0:50
met Carl in fact I hadn't heard of it before Carl's been joining some of our conversations but I didn't know the formal name of your uh organization
0:56
until now our other guest is Steve Yost who started and leads the Lexington online course Collective or Lex Ock a
1:04
diverse group of people who have who agree upon and take online courses together meeting weekly for discussions
1:11
Lex Ock have been active since early 2019 the evolving group has taken
1:17
courses ranging from Shakespeare to molecular biology and Steve offers help to propagate this
1:23
Cooperative learning model to others he's a software engineer musician rower and General on over of life so there we
1:32
go these are our guests uh I think with that clue about uh rower I can get a guess of anything about how Charlotte
1:39
met you Steve um uh would either of you like to say a
1:45
little bit about um your experiences of the puregaji project as well so this is also for anyone who happens to be joining at
1:51
episode 14 can serve as a brief introduction to Pure gaji from some of the newer members of our community
1:57
sure I can actually start um because I think I was first in line to meet
2:02
Charlotte of Carl and I and the way that came about is after having worked
2:09
through my Lexington online Collective for a few years I decided I wanted to be
2:15
able to share this model since it was so successful with with other people so I put together this website called online
2:23
coursecollective.org and uh and then you know the social platform Mastodon was
2:28
just coming into popularity I joined that and I saw a post by Howard reingold
2:37
um about work that he had just done that sounded just really lit up all the uh lit my light bulb and so I contacted
2:45
Howard he told me you should talk to the Pierogi people your God you people and uh so immediately I was connected with
2:52
Charlotte and uh and then it was a coincidence that she's also Aurora with just extra icing on the cake okay and it
2:58
was through that that I think thank Carl that I was acquainted with with your
3:04
work at WISE and so you can take it from there okay yeah thanks Steven thanks Joe yes
3:10
um in parallel so Steve had reached out we've been a member of a um an email discussion list for about 25
3:19
years in our careers overlapped a software company we uh we so we get to talking about our
3:28
projects and in parallel I've been looking at different ways of teaching uh
3:35
my focus is on teaching seniors so the periodicy project seemed to have some
3:41
very good models and one of the contributors to version three of the of the manual uh Brian Alexander is a a
3:50
friend and someone I've I've known uh through his work for quite a few years
3:56
so it's been a you know an engaging experience to
4:03
try to understand how we organize these peer groups and looking at the ways in
4:10
which learning and retirement groups or lifelong learning organizations have been doing similar
4:17
things wise has been in operation for 30 years of programs such as learning in
4:23
retirement started in the early 1960s so these are these are familiar models that
4:30
keep Reinventing themselves from time to time very cool yeah I think that they've
4:36
already hinted both of you now collectively collaboratively about how and why the pure God G project exists so
4:43
it exists partly for exchanges like this one and to be a place to bring some of those conversations which might be
4:48
happening on other mailing lists I'd be interested uh to to know that dealing with some other folks might want to uh
4:55
follow up there as well so yeah uh Charlotte if you could flip us ahead uh we got a quick uh profile images of
5:02
these folks I've never heard of assumption wise as well but I'm guessing this is also reference to the wise uh
5:09
project that we discussed before um so yeah so um thanks so much for joining us uh usually we do three topics
5:16
today we have four topics exceptionally so there's a lot to cover um we're just about five minutes in so
5:24
um online course collectives what are they and uh maybe we go to Steve first we could start a conversation what are
5:29
your top tips for starting your own online course Collective right right yeah so I'll first describe what it is
5:36
and and I use the uh you know what are they in hopes of propagating it and it's real I've already gotten some traction
5:42
elsewhere um the the way I it uh got started was I was
5:48
um about to go into semi-retirement and knowing that I I love learning and I
5:54
love collaborating with other people that's what I would miss at work um I thought I'd love to take online
5:59
courses I as I mentioned in my sort of Bio I I'm an omnivore of uh knowledge
6:05
and everything else and um I thought well I could take some courses but that's lonely so I live in
6:11
Lexington which is kind of a there's a lot of technical kind of people in town
6:18
White Collar kind of town you might say and that it had a mailing list and so I
6:24
posted a message to this mailing list hey anyone interested in taking a course together let's just decide what it will
6:30
be and we can get together at the library or somewhere once a week and I got good response and so fast forward
6:36
through all of the minutia of getting that all done that's the nuts and bolts that I could talk about at length
6:42
um we took our first course it was a success and
6:47
um and I reached out again to a larger audience including a Facebook audience I
6:52
had sort of a second round and got into more courses that were very um discussion oriented courses and so um
6:59
you can see on the on the site online coursecollective.org I've sort of a curated set of courses that we've taken
7:06
that are really good for discussion so each course lasts you know we take a course on like Coursera or mitx or or
7:15
um at your local library might be available canopies um for free all these are free by the way uh canopies uh Great
7:22
Courses so many different media so we choose one of these courses collectively
7:28
kind of come to a consensus about it and then we dive in and we meet once a week in person so that's the gist of of what it is and
7:37
um the characteristic of our particular group is that you know we're all kind of
7:43
omnivores like I said um we're open to all kinds of courses and the diversity of courses we've taken
7:48
is is really good also the diversity of people in our group is is really rich
7:55
and I think that makes for a good uh a good Discussion Group a good on ongoing
8:01
you know sharing interest and it's good to have different viewpoints uh in any kind of creative effort
8:07
um and it's interesting that the site online coursecollective.org is focused right
8:13
now on all these nuts and bolts like how to find a meeting room and what what's your next step and I was reflecting I
8:18
really need to add a lot more to the site that talks about how a group evolves and how the leadership in my
8:24
role in this case uh evolves as you first establish kind of okay what are
8:30
the ground rules and working relationship just sort of casually uh Institute this sort of social uh aspect
8:37
to it and then as the group evolves to be kind of people trust each other and know how to interact and so on with all
8:45
this diversity my role evolves to be more of a moderator um so not so much
8:51
guiding through the entire course of the week but just fostering the the conversations
8:59
and keeping it on track so it's interesting to think about that over time cool well maybe maybe uh we need to have
9:06
a piragachi pattern uh rated up as a pattern a nice succinct summary of you
9:12
know the evolving role uh perhaps is important but yeah going from spear adding something because you
9:17
wanted to keep learning too wow suddenly you're managing a organization of a lot of other people with similar interests
9:23
sounds like an exciting trajectory um Carl do you have anything you'd like to jump in to add to that discussion that
9:29
you do online do you do online course collectives or is this well they are a
9:35
bit more uh structured than uh Steve's experience we've been in business as I
9:41
said for about 30 years and started off with a group of retired
9:48
social workers who wanted to continue learning and now we have on a scale of
9:53
300 members it's a paid membership organization and we have a couple of paid staffers who assist with
10:01
registration and coordination of schedules and so on as well as
10:07
volunteers who select courses and instructors and evaluate those
10:12
instructors and our classes are five week 90-minute sessions
10:18
they are typically lecture discussion with
10:24
some smaller groups maybe more conversational we have 190
10:29
five-year-old philosophy Professor who teaches with a
10:35
Socratic method and so he's got some very precise ways of eliciting group
10:41
engagement we also have people who are teaching neoclass classes with more than
10:48
100 people and there were questions and comments that
10:53
uh your jam the jam the meeting so you know in between that I have my courses I
10:59
just finished teaching a course on wrongology the study of being wrong and
11:05
we'll be teaching a course in the fall on the the luddites the history of the
11:10
law ads in the early 19th century and coming up to the uh modern day
11:16
colloquial version of blood ice we're not smashing machines but we're actively
11:22
resisting the the power of mechanization over our over our lives
11:28
and so the the courses as I say are a bit more formal than what uh Steve has
11:35
talked about we do online courses we were forced into that by covid and we're
11:40
finding that lots of people particularly who live outside of the Worcester area I should have mentioned earlier were based
11:47
at assumption University in Worcester and we have um you know lots of people in the
11:52
Worcester area that also looking now I'm I'm at our Summer Place which is you know a good distance from Worcester and
12:01
um yet I'm able to participate in new teachers both take courses cool yeah I saw the slide that said 30
12:07
years ago uh 30 years of pure learning that's certainly a good track record uh more so than we've had in the puragaji
12:13
project although some of our uh members have been peer learning uh in different ways but to announce 30 years of pure
12:19
learning is quite exciting and see that written down I've typed that into Google and uh 30 years ago was uh Tuesday May
12:25
11 1993. the internet was about to get pretty big right back then but it sounds like you moved online
12:31
um fully online I appreciate that I was working at digital at the time and we got access to the
12:39
um Mosaic browser I think it was and you know it was probably one of the very few
12:45
times when I've made a prediction that came true the first time that I saw it
12:50
it was very small scale I said this is going to be big this is going to be really big and I got it right
12:58
uh I see you also uh on the slide it talks about an interest group in Ai and the Supreme Court that's a that's a very
13:04
up-to-date topic can you tell a little bit about that well sure uh we've been doing a supreme court discussion group
13:10
we have a retired attorney who leads those discussions and we look at uh
13:15
cases before the court uh you know throughout the Court's term so it starts in October and finishes at the end of
13:22
June uh the AI discussion special interest group is going to be starting this fall we've got a spotlight lecture
13:31
or discussion coming up in a couple of weeks where we will be able to talk
13:36
about things so the one of the aspects of it uh there are three of us will be
13:42
speaking one will be speaking on the ethics of AI another will be speaking on
13:49
some concerns and he calls it you know the devil is in the details and when I heard heard his title I said well I've
13:56
got to go back to uh these vanderer who said God is in the
14:02
details and so we're going to be focusing on three aspects of AI as a
14:07
kickoff to the special interest group that will be continuing into the next year with a particular focus on how AI
14:15
is going to be affecting seniors AI in
14:20
Healthcare AI in socialization AI in
14:26
education and how they regard it in preparation for their conversations with
14:31
their grandchildren so that they're not so afraid and not so bewildered when the
14:36
grandkids are talking about using chat GPT to summarize the paper that they've
14:42
just written that it sounds exciting I I'm curious to know uh to both of you if I could get
14:49
involved in some of these conversations and how I could get involved uh or how anyone could get involved if they were
14:54
you know living overseas or living in a different part of the country um but maybe we can fold that into a discussion of our next uh Point
15:00
Charlotte if you could if you could move his head to that uh uh slide topic three
15:05
is challenges for maintaining groups whether the groups are free or paid the need for schedule and how to Hawk
15:12
discussions uh outside need for scheduled and ad hoc discussions outside of uh formal meeting we also have a
15:18
question coming in best practices for maintaining interest and do people drop out so over 30 years I could imagine
15:24
people have come and gone from Wise uh you have some instructors the uh senior
15:30
instructors instructing seniors sounds cool but do you do you work with others who are of in younger Generations that's
15:37
the one first question so so we don't uh we don't check IDs uh people of any age
15:43
can join and there are people who on occasion who are perhaps uh you know
15:51
parents who are stay at home and they want to do something during the day while the kids are in school they'll
15:57
they can join uh we've had just a few of those other similar organizations have
16:03
been more proactive in that space and have been able to engage younger people
16:08
I have had students from assumption University come to my classes to present
16:15
their projects so I've worked for the history Professor a couple of times where the topic that I
16:23
was teaching related to research that these students were doing in the course
16:29
of their studies and so they would come and present their material on
16:35
advertising in colonial America or you know studies of
16:41
advertisements in newspapers in the uh
16:46
you know in the colonial era so we've had some opportunities for cross-generational discussions as well
16:54
as of course you have education among seniors and you know invariably we
17:01
there's an attrition rate because uh of our population which you know people do
17:07
get old and they they be older and they become uh unable to participate uh but
17:14
nobody gets to play the unto old card with me I've had people in their 90s
17:19
attend classes uh ask good questions about the technology as well as about
17:25
how um you know how to do other stuff so
17:30
there's there's no upper age limit and we try as often as possible to bring in
17:37
younger people so this this brings to because you do a lot of content production whereas uh it
17:44
sounds like your organization anyway does a lot of content production and bringing in guest speakers or people who
17:50
can present things whereas Steve it sounds to me as though primarily your organization has grown up around the
17:56
fact which is an interesting fact that there's so many other people out there doing great content production why don't we spend some time learning about it and
18:03
we'll produce maybe some Hera content which is the discussions and we might so so tell a little bit but then you are
18:09
also talking Steve that you yourself felt motivated to create sort of an instruction manual how others can do
18:16
this and we I know at least one person in the periodicy project who was inspired by your work uh Fabio this is
18:23
and he said I'm gonna go try it so he went he went off and tried it so you've got this great kind of experimental
18:28
process that pretty much anyone anywhere in the world fabulous in Brazil can can replicate
18:34
um and you know report also on what works for them so it sounds like you are creating some kind content is that is
18:40
that uh is that gold um I could start by sort of contrasting
18:46
with the the wise model um and also getting back to your question what would it take if uh if you
18:52
wanted to participate and I'll I'll say that one thing about what what we have in the Lexington group uh and given that
18:59
has the name Lexington is that it it's really important it certainly was a key
19:04
factor when we started to meet in person uh because the kinds of discussions I
19:09
mean we're all used to zoom meetings like uh and other online meetings like this and and of course uh reminiscing
19:17
mostly about great uh gatherings in person
19:22
um and so given that the on the in-person component is is really
19:28
important even though we're online mostly now we still get together for beers or something now and then
19:34
especially when it's time to choose the next course when you really want to feel of the room and you know
19:40
a good sense of people's uh uh even just the minute uh facial expressions you
19:46
know are they are you on board with this that kind of thing so so that part of it is important now to get to your question
19:53
that you you just asked about creating content um that's I would call that sort of meta
19:58
content like it's like this this model has worked for us this pattern you might say I really like the pattern language
20:05
kind of uh language um since it's worked for us I'd like to see
20:11
if we could replicate this model I don't have any personal interest in it but it's worked so well and it's so much fun
20:16
for us uh I want to empower others to do this and it was really fantastic that
20:21
having gotten involved in the Pierogi meetings uh that Fabio took it up and
20:27
it's an interesting um segue a little bit to think about the
20:32
different kinds of this model there are flavors of it so the current one we have in Lexington
20:38
is a group of omnivores they're there for the long run looking forward to the next course as soon as one course is
20:44
finished um there's a there's another perfectly valid model uh and useful model for
20:51
which this works which is a group of professionals which is what Fabio did uh
20:57
he and a group of teachers took a course uh called I believe was called the bilingual mind
21:03
um and their English their their language teachers and um and so they found this course online
21:10
and met I believe it was uh once a week to discuss what they agreed to cover for
21:17
that week and it's just a good way of motivating uh yourselves collectively to do the do the work so the more technical
21:24
or and in fact that's how we started just to go back a bit I started the Lexington online Collective and I put up
21:31
all these possible courses from history to Art to machine learning
21:37
yeah this group of people that came together had never met at the library chose to do the hardest and the longest
21:43
course which is of course on machine learning that went probably three months
21:48
and by the time we were finished we went from seven people down to three people
21:53
because just normal attrition it's hard work and so the courses as I mentioned we do
22:00
now are more geared towards social interaction where I imagine that Fabio's
22:05
was really about doing the work right I'll mention one other
22:11
variant of this model which I I called paragogy
22:16
um because uh along the course of doing these courses there was one course like heavy duty
22:22
statistics course I wanted to take and I knew it was not going to be good for our group and so I just posted to the group
22:28
anybody want to take this with me it's just we're just going to be doing the homework and one person responded that's
22:34
exactly what I wanted to take and so she and I met at the library and we came up
22:39
with this model where we agreed that each week one of us would act as the professor
22:46
we've both studied the work but one of us had to sort of teach the course and of course you we all know that
22:54
having to teach something is the best way to learn it very thoroughly so that was another variant of
23:00
of of this Collective model that worked really well just one-on-one if I could just toss it so one of the
23:08
things that I just started I'll say playing with Khan Academy of course as
23:14
you know courses primarily geared to high school and younger ages uh
23:22
Sal Khan has just released a tutor an AI enabled tutor that is
23:30
integrated into Khan Academy to help students understand you know how you
23:37
know where they went wrong in a particular module I just got access to it and so I'm picking up on a statistics
23:43
course that I started a couple of years ago and didn't finish but it was very helpful in you know very specifically
23:51
showing me without giving me the answer showing me where my answer was wrong and
23:57
working as a one-on-one tutor and this is his model of being able to have a
24:04
scalable system so that you get one-on-one tutors for millions of
24:09
students and I think this uh so just as a segue on statistics I mean this is
24:17
just your basic statistics not nothing of the scale that would Steve was
24:22
talking about that's pretty exciting pretty exciting I mean it's very current because I see Khan Academy he posted this news May 1. so consider yourself to
24:29
be a part of The Cutting Edge I'd never heard of that was interesting along those lines is that uh Andrew ing who's
24:35
a who's a star in the world of machine learning uh actually founded Coursera
24:40
you know with this platform for which through which we take a lot of these courses and I saw a talk by him in which
24:46
he explained that they are even even in the early days very carefully tracks students progress and when they dropped
24:54
off and and they so they what they would adjust do a b tests and kind of things on on the quizzes to try to keep people
25:01
engaged and want to make the quiz too hard but not too easy and so that's been
25:06
a aspect of these at least the two that we've talked about of these platforms is
25:13
to try to ensure that people succeed to get through a course
25:18
so so um I'd like to do a number of things simultaneously one is uh Charlotte if we can move on to topic four and we have
25:25
that up on the screen the next one is uh if you're willing to jump into the discussion Charlotte I wanted to bring you into the discussion about uh topic
25:31
oriented discussions because you're also running um you know and have been for a while
25:37
helping run ipney the uh New England uh independent Publishers organization so
25:42
that's an interest group uh about book discussions about publishing books rather than reading books but here's here's a number of topics around special
25:49
interest groups book discussion writing groups special events travel um so I wondered if you had any comments
25:55
or questions for Carl and Steve uh based on your experiences with iffney or other other organizations yeah we well I've
26:02
been on the board and involved in in ipne uh independent Publishers of New
26:07
England for since so 2008 I think but it's been you know uh pretty
26:16
uh rough I there hasn't been a lot of progress in just sort of gelling a
26:22
you know truly engaged Dynamic community of people
26:27
um but there's been some success and I think one of the things that we've done
26:33
in recent years so we have six states right New England states
26:39
with varying numbers of members in each one but we decided to start Regional groups and
26:47
those have been kind of sputtering along since you know for the last 10 years maybe
26:52
um but Zoom has or you know online connections
26:58
have really enhanced that and we I think the
27:04
major thing is is to do it regularly so
27:09
I finally got you know a regular schedule for the Connecticut and we started a Connecticut group of Vermont
27:15
group who's really thriving and the Metro Boston group but we have other states that you know other regions that
27:23
we could develop I think those two things like
27:29
I don't know okay people just for this wide area it's
27:36
it's hard to to kind of form a common Bond or you know
27:42
and so we're starting with the regional things uh trying to
27:47
maintain attention before the show we were talking about you know my
27:53
definition of luxury is being able to do one thing at a time and we have so many things pulling at us and trying to
28:00
ensure that members of these learning groups can well you know to use Freight
28:08
Steve's phrase you can succeed part of it is to keep them engaged and part and
28:15
by that I also mean keep you know keep me engaged because you know I will I've
28:21
got the oh oh squirrel kind of response to so many different cool things and it
28:28
disrupts my ability to participate in any one thing really well right
28:39
for what is you know what people's like little thing
28:45
is you know and then try and address that once in a while you know yeah that makes sense you might find an
28:52
idea that works really well in one context for a while but doesn't doesn't work very well in another context or
28:57
indeed does work in another context again for a while so how do you how do you keep things Lively and moving uh
29:03
this this uh we're gonna have to leave keep this one moving um you can move to our closing uh slides just talk a little
29:10
bit about how we like to close out these conversations so yeah that is a comment on all the people who've contributed to
29:16
making this possible thank you everybody for uh participating in the podcast and
29:21
in the Pierogi project as as well and on the very next slide uh there's some
29:27
questions uh what did we expect to learn or make together what happened uh what are some different perspectives on what happened uh what did we learn and what
29:33
should we change going forward and I very much hope our guests will be able to stick around we've got one more slide uh the after discussion will take place
29:40
on meet.jit.si/peeragogy and there's other ways for you to get involved with the Peeragogy project at peeragogy.org so
29:47
have a look at that if you're interested there's loads of ways to find us on online but the discussion and I can
29:53
think of a few interesting next steps I'd like to discuss with uh guests will be taking place on that link in a few
29:59
minutes so um for those who can stick around I'll see you there thanks so much to Carl and Steve thank you Charlotte thank you thank you
30:06
very much all right see you on Jitsi