Learning Groups

Learning groups, peer-to-peer courses, and course co-laboratories are all terms for the same idea of bringing people together to learn. The internet is full of endless resources to learn from alone, but The internet lacks platforms for bringing people together to learn collectively. A place where students learn and bring what they've learnt back to teach the group (Teaching is an effective to learn material and identify weak areas of knowledge), and where they can share resources with the group.

Central to researching what kind of platform can enable people to learn together in a digital medium is the idea of building better Conversational Interfaces. Just mashing people together in one room does not facilitate learning, and Video calls are not an adequate substitute to in-person communication. How can the platform itself facilitate conversation and collaboration?

Education should nurture people to develop their own projects, research, and ideas, or in other words, education should be an Enabling environment

Principles

  • 1. Connect a group around a central learning/research topic (well-defined but open for exploration)
  • 2. Instead of a teacher, participants learn together, teach each other, and share their own experiences
  • 3. Group produces an artifact to leave behind: document, video, research paper: a breadcrumb trail for future learners to follow in their footsteps

The last point about producing an artifact to leave behind is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects because each pod will inevitably have different processes, skills, and output of this final artifact. It may however be a very useful goal to work towards.

Questions

  • What kinds of ways are there to collaboratively meet and share ideas?
  • How can a platform facilitate group dynamics and conversation?
  • How might a discussion or conversation forum be structured as to work towards creating a polished final product
    • Iteratively refining and summarising, discussion starts out in a "rough ideas" section and slowly moves through the process of refinement

Links to this note

ʘ Architecture of Writing

I am interested in exploring this topic further as a collaborative Learning Groups, see: ☰ Architecture of Writing Course

ʘ Open Design Challenges

Learning Groups

☰ Architecture of Writing Course

Outline for a collaborative Learning Groups exploring the ʘ Architecture of Writing

§ Projects

Planning to run Learning Groups to collectively explore the ʘ Architecture of Writing as a group

§ Projects

Learning Groups / Peer Learning

Collective artifacts structure collaborative learning and engagement

However, by focusing on creating X you may become distracted from learning Y. So ideally the system or interface of interaction should facilitate learning Y in a way that naturally builds up to X over time. I imagine this could be done through some system of highlighting and summarizing with a well-defined structure in-mind for the final artifact. I will experiment with this type of synthesis in my ☰ Architecture of Writing Course, as well as future Learning Groups experiments relating to ʘ Neuropolis

Artifacts might not be the right framing for collective output

My hypothesis that Collective artifacts structure collaborative learning and engagement might not be entirely accurate. In my Learning Groups I have realized that it is difficult to "create" together because we each have divergent goals of learning.

Minimum Viable World

Concept I came up with during a conversation (1) about general artificial intelligence during one of my Future of Learning Learning Groups. The idea is that the approach to creating general intelligence should mimic the same process through which human intelligence developed, through evolution within an environment in which collaboration, language, and the development of mental faculties proved useful for furthering our species. My hypothesis is that AGI can only emerge by evolving alongside itself and being forced into environments where it must learn to communicate to survive.

Types of learning groups

Through facilitating a set of Learning Groups I have discovered that my hypothesis that Collective artifacts structure collaborative learning and engagement to be not entirely true and that Artifacts might not be the right framing for collective output. The reason for this is that the participants of the groups have divergent goals, which means that providing a goal of creating a single artifact is counter-intuitive. This leads me to consider how my Δ Model of engagement can be applied to understanding the different types of learning groups: