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