Truly Learning?
The Modern Peer Learning : A Normative Critique
One of the most visible approaches to peer learning emerges from cognitive psychology and is applied within a "mainstream" educational framework. "Peer learning is an educational practice in which students interact with other students to achieve educational goals."Â
Other authors, including David Boud, have described peer learning as a way of moving from self-directed learning to interdependence or mutual learning among peers. In this context, it can be compared to a practice called cooperative learning. However, other contemporary views of peer learning relax the constraints and position "peer learning" as the mode of "learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything." Peer learning manifests aspects of self-regulation that are largely absent in pedagogical models of teaching and learning, whether it occurs in a formal or informal learning context, in small groups or online.
In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education, John Dewey wrote, "Education is not a matter of "telling" and "being told," but an active and constructive process." In a later essay, entitled "Experience and Education," Dewey went into more detail about the science of child development and developed the basic constructivist theory that knowledge is created through experience and not passed down from teacher to student through rote learning. The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who developed the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, is another proponent of constructivist learning. His book, Thinking and Language, provides evidence that students learn better through meaningful, collaborative problem-solving activities than through a single exercise. Three features that distinguish constructivist theory are the claims that:
• Learning occurs in contexts that are part of what is learned.
• Knowing and doing are inseparable.
• Learning is a process that is extended over time.
This is a proposition that is clearly meaningful in social contexts with ongoing relationships where people work on collaborative or shared projects or assignments. In general, peer learning can adapt constructivist or discovery learning methods for peer-to-peer contexts; however, peer learning usually manifests constructivist ideas in more informal ways, where learning and collaboration are only applied to solving some real shared problem. Critical pedagogy engages students and instructors in analyzing and critiquing the power structures around them.Â
The scholar most influential in the development of this field is Paulo Freire, whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed describes the traditional teaching framework as a "banking system" in which students are seen as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge and concepts.
In contrast, Freire advocated for a more equitable relationship between teacher and student, where information is questioned and placed in a political context, and all participants in the class work together to create knowledge. Yochai Benkler explains how the now ubiquitous computers help us generate and process knowledge with others in his book, The Wealth of Networks. George Siemens argues that technology has changed the way we learn, explaining how it has tended to complicate or expose the limitations of past learning theories. In practice, ideas of connectivity thrive in and alongside new social formations, such as "massive open online courses," or MOOCs.
Connectivism proposes that the knowledge that we have access to by virtue of our connections with others is as valuable as the information that is brought into our minds. Therefore, the learning process is not completely under individual control—learning can occur outside of ourselves, as if we were members of a large organization where many people are constantly updating a shared database.
In a joint paper, Roy Williams, Regina Karousou, and Jenny Mackness argue that educational institutions should consider "emergency learning," Â in which learning emerges from the interaction of self-organized groups, as a valuable component of education in the digital age. Web 2.0 places distributed individuals in group settings where emergent learning can occur. However, deciding how to manage emergence is important; "fail-safe" management drives activities towards predetermined outcomes, while "fail-safe experiments" eschew negative outcomes while leaving room for error and innovation. Williams et al. also distinguish between the terms "environment" as controlled and "ecology" as free or open.
Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum discuss the implications of the field of moral philosophy in their 2006 essay, "Equal-Based Production and Virtue." They argue that today's Internet "socio-technical system" makes it easier for people to become role models and adopt positive, virtuous behavior on a large scale. The learning theories and approaches described above are currently being tested in peer learning communities around the world, often adapting educational technology to support informal learning, although results in formal learning contexts also exist. For example, Eric Mazur and colleagues report "ten years of experience and results" with a teaching technique they call "peer instruction":
