Credit: Photo by Thomas Hawk under an Attribution NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license
Image: People interacting together.

The other day Howard Rheingold asked me a question that made me stop and think:

@eingang Would you say Open University UK is the grandmother of today’s emerging p2p learning communities?
April 11, 2011 @17:20, Howard Rheingold.

The Open University (OU) started off in distance education, providing accredited university level courses in the United Kingdom starting in 1971¹. I didn’t join the OU until 2000 when they launched their first online course: T171, You, Your Computer, and The Net. Unlike earlier OU courses, this course required substantial online interaction between students and tutors. Even the assignments were submitted electronically. The whole course, however, was not completely online. It was more of a blended learning approach, as it featured high production quality printed booklets of the study materials, commercial books, and some face-to-face tutorials across the 9-month course, in addition to the forums and course website.

One thing it did attempt to do, and that is evident still in the design of many of today’s OU courses, is encourage students to form a peer learning community. At the time, it did this through FirstClass forums, not just by providing the previously isolated distance education students with forums they could use for communication, but by setting assignments that required students to engage in dialogue with one another. This is a beautiful example of Brown & Adler’s social view of learning (2008), where understanding is socially constructed by members of the group interacting with one another, to share and build upon their existing knowledge. Vygotsky and Dewey would have approved, as this fits in with a constructivist approach to learning, something that is also often very evident in OU courses.

Is a peer learning community the same as a peer-to-peer learning community? I am not so sure about that. However, an example of such a community that occurs to me is Livemocha, a language learning website. Livemocha capitalizes on social knowing by bringing together potential teachers (native speakers) with interested learners to facilitate learning practical, conversational language skills (Livemocha 2011). This also leverages social capital, an important component in maintaining social networks. I would say Livemocha is both a peer-to-peer learning community and a peer learning community, because it specifically seeks to make relationships between people as well as providing an overall, larger community sphere where legitimate peripheral participation (c.f. Lave & Wenger 1991) can occur.

Is the OU a peer-to-peer learning community? I think their “traditional” courses—whether online or offline—probably are not. While we are attempting to form communities, we’re not trying specifically to make them peer-to-peer, although that can occur as a result of people being brought together in a community around a course or a tutor group. To be honest, even after doing this bit of thinking, I’m not sure, so I thought I’d ask for input from other members of the OU community. What do you think? Is the OU the grandmother of peer-to-peer learning communities?

1: Although the OU was established in 1969, the first students weren’t enrolled until 1971 (The Open University n.d.).

References:

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). ‘Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0’ EDUCAUSE Review, 43 (1), [Online] Available from: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823 (Accessed April 18, 2011).

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York, NY, United States, Cambridge University Press.

Livemocha (2011). Livemocha Language Learning Method, [online]. Available from: http://www.livemocha.com/language-learning-method (Accessed April 18, 2011).

The Open University (n.d.). History of the OU, [online]. Available from: http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/main/the-ou-explained/history-the-ou (Accessed April 18, 2011).

Image: Howard Rheingold and Elsheindra, Michelle’s World of Warcraft character, together at last.

Howard Rheingold contacted me in September to interview me about World of Warcraft and learning, because he knows I’m researching communities and learning in World of Warcraft.  We were finally able to meet up today for the interview.   He is working on a book about the kinds of skills people need for life online.

His first question was: What kind of collaborative skills have I found to be valuable from World of Warcraft?

I discussed how people come together in groups and need to be able to collaborate in two ways: one by taking instruction and two by giving or receiving advice.  The main idea there was that people initially learn from others who have already done something before or who have read it.  Then they too later pass that knowledge on to other people that they come in contact with in the same circumstances to help ensure the success of that future group.  It’s a kind of a just-in-time knowledge transmission.  When the knowledge doesn’t already exist or isn’t known, players build models or theories based on what they observe happening and then test those theories out.  If necessary the theory is adjusted until they come up with something that works.  Those players or others like them may then come together again but outside the world in wikis, forums, and blogs to build up a community of knowledge, taking it from the tacit to the documented known.

I also talked about leadership skills and performance metrics and how WoW provides mechanisms in the game that allow people to examine their own performance and the performance of others around them outside the game.  That’s used to learn and to improve individual performance or group performance.  Reflection and review, as well as leadership, are valuable skills in the real world, because we need people able to organize people and to look at problems creatively.  World of Warcraft fosters and rewards people who are willing to do that.

Finally, I discussed the variety of people present in World of Warcraft.  In Europe the groups vary not just by age, but by culture as well.  Being able to organize and maintain social groups is a skill.  Most guilds don’t last a year, but some of the guilds I’ve been associated with have been around since World of Warcraft started and that’s a testament to the skills their leaders have in maintaining community.  While communities can coalesce on their own.  They don’t maintain themselves.

I can’t remember precisely what I said and I have possibly been more literate in places in this post, but the above is some of the gist of what I discussed in the interview.  I didn’t record the session.  Luckily, Howard’s going to send me a transcript. I’m really excited about the things I’m discovering in World of Warcraft. It was a pleasure to talk to Howard about it.

Credits:

The screen composite of Howard and Elsheindra is licensed by Michelle A. Hoyle under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Joi Ito published the original image of Howard Rheingold under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.