> Is Wikipedia a relevant model for e-learning? This title invites skepticism b/c, a priori, Wikipedia is a website, not a "model". Paragogy, which you mention -- thanks! -- might be closer: it at least contains the seeds of a model of learning. Theoretical precision is still work in progress - I'd be happy to talk more with you about the current state of the art here, if you'd like.
Incidentally, my thesis focuses on a mathematical case study, but the theory of paragogy is _not_ limited to mathematics. Charlie Danoff and I wanted to describe how learning works at P2PU -- in particular, we were thinking about "synergizing individual and organizational learning" (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Arided/ParagogyPaper); in other words, how does P2PU "learn" as an organization? Our opinion was that there were many lost opportunities (http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-739/paper_5.pdf), precisely because there wasn't an effective model in place. In this connection: I think is important to reconcile the horizontalism of peer learning with the "relentless elitism" that Fred Bauder indicated in his comment on your preprint. Organizations tend to be built around some set of "protected" resources. For example, anyone can edit Wikipedia, but changes are subject to peer review; changes to the _software_ are subject to even stricter peer review. This tension is where you would expect to see a "model of learning" arise. The accretion of comments and changes provide an analogy to sense perception (c.f. G. Deleuze, "Empiricism and subjectivity: an essay on Hume's theory of human nature" / "Empirisme et subjectivité. Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume"), peer review is vaguely similar to a neural network; and if we talk about "Wikipedia as a model" we would think of it as a collectively-created and curated picture of the world. To be clear: you don't get a model without a selection function, an inside and an outside. > Epistemic value. Encouraging scientific skills and methodologies appears as > the main asset of the “wiki > way”. Yet, the epistemic value of a specific device is uneasy to > circumscribe. This study has not gone beyond > a mere recollection of effects, that is the registered facts that students > were crossing several sources and > developing critical attitude toward published knowledge. Albeit limited to > mathematics, the ongoing doctoral > thesis of Joe Cornelli delivers some valuable insights on peer learning. > Following the Wikipedia model, he > defines this particular way of apprehending knowledge as paragogy, that is > parallel (para-) leading (-gogy). In addition to the suggested changes above, one other minor change... it's CORNELI (one L) -- thanks! :-) Joe _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
