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