Peer-to-Peer Pedagogy (P3) Workshop on Collaborative Learning Across Disciplines, Ages, and Institutions in Higher Education

A workshop funded by the Digital Media and Learning Initiative of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University

Sept. 10, 2010

http://hastacscholars.wikispaces.com/p3

The Problem

Digital media have transformed learning in at least two ways that demand far more research, analysis, case studies, and models. First, digital media, and especially social media, are fundamentally about interaction. When that interaction is directed towards research and learning, the result can be collaboration, and collaboration as a potentially open form that works across ages, disciplines, backgrounds, nations. HASTAC has branded this form of unbounded digitally-enabled interaction as "collaboration by difference" (Davidson and Goldberg, 2009). That brings us to the second issue of digital modes of learning: they are often unmediated, non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer rather than scripted or orchestrated by an authority figure. These two interlinked components—collaboration and peer-topeer interaction—are crucial, definitional components of digital learning. They also demand sustained and skilled cultivation. Without careful assessment and research, both components can fall short of their potential for visionary and innovative learning. Nor are they often taught as skills. We do little at any point in K-20 training to encourage (or understand) the techniques of successful collaborative peer-topeer interchange, evaluation, or pedagogy.

There is tremendous interest in collaborative learning methods—and a paucity of solid research in the pedagogy of collaboration. There is often active resistance to giving up traditional hierarchical methods of instruction, interaction, and evaluation. Collaboration often occurs among those with similar disciplinary training, methodologies, assumptions, and personal backgrounds (racial or gender).

The Plan

A major goal of the P3 Workshop will be to consider and experience the value added by collaborative thinking across disciplines that are not often in conversation with one another. The P3 Workshop seeks to understand what sparks and inspires visionary thinking. We will ask the graduate student and faculty participants to consider how their own work can embody "collaboration by difference" and how their objectives could be extended and enhanced by diverse, peer-motivated participation, evaluation and assessment.

In the face of new forms of digital media and the ever-changing landscape of education and academia, reconsidering evaluation and assessment is a key facet of peer-to-peer pedagogy. As such, the day will begin with a panel that capitalizes on the groundwork laid by the successful "Grading 2.0: Evaluation in a Digital Age" HASTAC Scholar forum held this Fall. Led by Cathy N. Davidson, the panel will include Anne Balsamo, Nils Peterson and David Gibson. This panel will provide the framework that will shape discussions for the rest of the workshop. After the panel each speaker will host a breakout session where they will present and/or demo their own work and projects and facilitate more in-depth discussions as inspired by the broader panel framework.

After lunch we will reconvene for an afternoon barcamp shaped by the work of the morning, which will include reporting on the work conducted in breakout sessions. Anticipated topics for the barcamp sessions include: (1) How do we insure inclusion of the forms of interpretive, critical, historical, and theoretical perspectives of the humanities in qualitative and quantitative research on digital learning that is predominantly carried out in the social sciences and information sciences? (2) How do we insure inclusion of the critical perspectives and self-representations of underrepresented minorities and of women in digital learning research? Diversity—in all ways—is a crucial component in collaboration and in peer-to-peer pedagogy, as it undergirds the way research and intellectual hierarchy are often configured at what Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls the Historically-White University (HWU); and (3) How new paradigms of evaluation and assessment can better support peer-to-peer collaborative principles and the way students learn in today’s digital world.

The Outcome

Thinking through these deliberately provocative and vexing problems will contribute to the content of the field of digital media and learning and the methodologies of collaboration and peer-to-peer learning, as well as to methods for intellectually productive cross-disciplinary conflict exploration and resolution. What counts as research in our field of digital media and learning? Who is counted? How do we value and assess learning?