S2E15: Success in Collaborative Learning Environments

environments today and we're joined by Carl and Steve I'll introduce them 0:11 briefly you can see them there up on screen, Charlotte is behind the 0:17 scenes making this this all happened so Karl Hakkarainen has been an instructor 0:24 at the Worcester Institute for senior education which is otherwise known as wise for more than a decade teaching 0:33 courses on technology history law and the social sciences he retired from a long career in high 0:39 tech and journalism and his grandchildren still ask him for help with their tech gadgets so I'll be very 0:45 interested to learn about whys I hadn't ever heard of it uh before uh before I 0:50 met Carl in fact I hadn't heard of it before Carl's been joining some of our conversations but I didn't know the formal name of your uh organization 0:56 until now our other guest is Steve Yost who started and leads the Lexington online course Collective or Lex Ock a 1:04 diverse group of people who have who agree upon and take online courses together meeting weekly for discussions 1:11 Lex Ock have been active since early 2019 the evolving group has taken 1:17 courses ranging from Shakespeare to molecular biology and Steve offers help to propagate this 1:23 Cooperative learning model to others he's a software engineer musician rower and General on over of life so there we 1:32 go these are our guests uh I think with that clue about uh rower I can get a guess of anything about how Charlotte 1:39 met you Steve um uh would either of you like to say a 1:45 little bit about um your experiences of the puregaji project as well so this is also for anyone who happens to be joining at 1:51 episode 14 can serve as a brief introduction to Pure gaji from some of the newer members of our community 1:57 sure I can actually start um because I think I was first in line to meet 2:02 Charlotte of Carl and I and the way that came about is after having worked 2:09 through my Lexington online Collective for a few years I decided I wanted to be 2:15 able to share this model since it was so successful with with other people so I put together this website called online 2:23 coursecollective.org and uh and then you know the social platform Mastodon was 2:28 just coming into popularity I joined that and I saw a post by Howard reingold 2:37 um about work that he had just done that sounded just really lit up all the uh lit my light bulb and so I contacted 2:45 Howard he told me you should talk to the Pierogi people your God you people and uh so immediately I was connected with 2:52 Charlotte and uh and then it was a coincidence that she's also Aurora with just extra icing on the cake okay and it 2:58 was through that that I think thank Carl that I was acquainted with with your 3:04 work at WISE and so you can take it from there okay yeah thanks Steven thanks Joe yes 3:10 um in parallel so Steve had reached out we've been a member of a um an email discussion list for about 25 3:19 years in our careers overlapped a software company we uh we so we get to talking about our 3:28 projects and in parallel I've been looking at different ways of teaching uh 3:35 my focus is on teaching seniors so the periodicy project seemed to have some 3:41 very good models and one of the contributors to version three of the of the manual uh Brian Alexander is a a 3:50 friend and someone I've I've known uh through his work for quite a few years 3:56 so it's been a you know an engaging experience to 4:03 try to understand how we organize these peer groups and looking at the ways in 4:10 which learning and retirement groups or lifelong learning organizations have been doing similar 4:17 things wise has been in operation for 30 years of programs such as learning in 4:23 retirement started in the early 1960s so these are these are familiar models that 4:30 keep Reinventing themselves from time to time very cool yeah I think that they've 4:36 already hinted both of you now collectively collaboratively about how and why the pure God G project exists so 4:43 it exists partly for exchanges like this one and to be a place to bring some of those conversations which might be 4:48 happening on other mailing lists I'd be interested uh to to know that dealing with some other folks might want to uh 4:55 follow up there as well so yeah uh Charlotte if you could flip us ahead uh we got a quick uh profile images of 5:02 these folks I've never heard of assumption wise as well but I'm guessing this is also reference to the wise uh 5:09 project that we discussed before um so yeah so um thanks so much for joining us uh usually we do three topics 5:16 today we have four topics exceptionally so there's a lot to cover um we're just about five minutes in so 5:24 um online course collectives what are they and uh maybe we go to Steve first we could start a conversation what are 5:29 your top tips for starting your own online course Collective right right yeah so I'll first describe what it is 5:36 and and I use the uh you know what are they in hopes of propagating it and it's real I've already gotten some traction 5:42 elsewhere um the the way I it uh got started was I was 5:48 um about to go into semi-retirement and knowing that I I love learning and I 5:54 love collaborating with other people that's what I would miss at work um I thought I'd love to take online 5:59 courses I as I mentioned in my sort of Bio I I'm an omnivore of uh knowledge 6:05 and everything else and um I thought well I could take some courses but that's lonely so I live in 6:11 Lexington which is kind of a there's a lot of technical kind of people in town 6:18 White Collar kind of town you might say and that it had a mailing list and so I 6:24 posted a message to this mailing list hey anyone interested in taking a course together let's just decide what it will 6:30 be and we can get together at the library or somewhere once a week and I got good response and so fast forward 6:36 through all of the minutia of getting that all done that's the nuts and bolts that I could talk about at length 6:42 um we took our first course it was a success and 6:47 um and I reached out again to a larger audience including a Facebook audience I 6:52 had sort of a second round and got into more courses that were very um discussion oriented courses and so um 6:59 you can see on the on the site online coursecollective.org I've sort of a curated set of courses that we've taken 7:06 that are really good for discussion so each course lasts you know we take a course on like Coursera or mitx or or 7:15 um at your local library might be available canopies um for free all these are free by the way uh canopies uh Great 7:22 Courses so many different media so we choose one of these courses collectively 7:28 kind of come to a consensus about it and then we dive in and we meet once a week in person so that's the gist of of what it is and 7:37 um the characteristic of our particular group is that you know we're all kind of 7:43 omnivores like I said um we're open to all kinds of courses and the diversity of courses we've taken 7:48 is is really good also the diversity of people in our group is is really rich 7:55 and I think that makes for a good uh a good Discussion Group a good on ongoing 8:01 you know sharing interest and it's good to have different viewpoints uh in any kind of creative effort 8:07 um and it's interesting that the site online coursecollective.org is focused right 8:13 now on all these nuts and bolts like how to find a meeting room and what what's your next step and I was reflecting I 8:18 really need to add a lot more to the site that talks about how a group evolves and how the leadership in my 8:24 role in this case uh evolves as you first establish kind of okay what are 8:30 the ground rules and working relationship just sort of casually uh Institute this sort of social uh aspect 8:37 to it and then as the group evolves to be kind of people trust each other and know how to interact and so on with all 8:45 this diversity my role evolves to be more of a moderator um so not so much 8:51 guiding through the entire course of the week but just fostering the the conversations 8:59 and keeping it on track so it's interesting to think about that over time cool well maybe maybe uh we need to have 9:06 a piragachi pattern uh rated up as a pattern a nice succinct summary of you 9:12 know the evolving role uh perhaps is important but yeah going from spear adding something because you 9:17 wanted to keep learning too wow suddenly you're managing a organization of a lot of other people with similar interests 9:23 sounds like an exciting trajectory um Carl do you have anything you'd like to jump in to add to that discussion that 9:29 you do online do you do online course collectives or is this well they are a 9:35 bit more uh structured than uh Steve's experience we've been in business as I 9:41 said for about 30 years and started off with a group of retired 9:48 social workers who wanted to continue learning and now we have on a scale of 9:53 300 members it's a paid membership organization and we have a couple of paid staffers who assist with 10:01 registration and coordination of schedules and so on as well as 10:07 volunteers who select courses and instructors and evaluate those 10:12 instructors and our classes are five week 90-minute sessions 10:18 they are typically lecture discussion with 10:24 some smaller groups maybe more conversational we have 190 10:29 five-year-old philosophy Professor who teaches with a 10:35 Socratic method and so he's got some very precise ways of eliciting group 10:41 engagement we also have people who are teaching neoclass classes with more than 10:48 100 people and there were questions and comments that 10:53 uh your jam the jam the meeting so you know in between that I have my courses I 10:59 just finished teaching a course on wrongology the study of being wrong and 11:05 we'll be teaching a course in the fall on the the luddites the history of the 11:10 law ads in the early 19th century and coming up to the uh modern day 11:16 colloquial version of blood ice we're not smashing machines but we're actively 11:22 resisting the the power of mechanization over our over our lives 11:28 and so the the courses as I say are a bit more formal than what uh Steve has 11:35 talked about we do online courses we were forced into that by covid and we're 11:40 finding that lots of people particularly who live outside of the Worcester area I should have mentioned earlier were based 11:47 at assumption University in Worcester and we have um you know lots of people in the 11:52 Worcester area that also looking now I'm I'm at our Summer Place which is you know a good distance from Worcester and 12:01 um yet I'm able to participate in new teachers both take courses cool yeah I saw the slide that said 30 12:07 years ago uh 30 years of pure learning that's certainly a good track record uh more so than we've had in the puragaji 12:13 project although some of our uh members have been peer learning uh in different ways but to announce 30 years of pure 12:19 learning is quite exciting and see that written down I've typed that into Google and uh 30 years ago was uh Tuesday May 12:25 11 1993. the internet was about to get pretty big right back then but it sounds like you moved online 12:31 um fully online I appreciate that I was working at digital at the time and we got access to the 12:39 um Mosaic browser I think it was and you know it was probably one of the very few 12:45 times when I've made a prediction that came true the first time that I saw it 12:50 it was very small scale I said this is going to be big this is going to be really big and I got it right 12:58 uh I see you also uh on the slide it talks about an interest group in Ai and the Supreme Court that's a that's a very 13:04 up-to-date topic can you tell a little bit about that well sure uh we've been doing a supreme court discussion group 13:10 we have a retired attorney who leads those discussions and we look at uh 13:15 cases before the court uh you know throughout the Court's term so it starts in October and finishes at the end of 13:22 June uh the AI discussion special interest group is going to be starting this fall we've got a spotlight lecture 13:31 or discussion coming up in a couple of weeks where we will be able to talk 13:36 about things so the one of the aspects of it uh there are three of us will be 13:42 speaking one will be speaking on the ethics of AI another will be speaking on 13:49 some concerns and he calls it you know the devil is in the details and when I heard heard his title I said well I've 13:56 got to go back to uh these vanderer who said God is in the 14:02 details and so we're going to be focusing on three aspects of AI as a 14:07 kickoff to the special interest group that will be continuing into the next year with a particular focus on how AI 14:15 is going to be affecting seniors AI in 14:20 Healthcare AI in socialization AI in 14:26 education and how they regard it in preparation for their conversations with 14:31 their grandchildren so that they're not so afraid and not so bewildered when the 14:36 grandkids are talking about using chat GPT to summarize the paper that they've 14:42 just written that it sounds exciting I I'm curious to know uh to both of you if I could get 14:49 involved in some of these conversations and how I could get involved uh or how anyone could get involved if they were 14:54 you know living overseas or living in a different part of the country um but maybe we can fold that into a discussion of our next uh Point 15:00 Charlotte if you could if you could move his head to that uh uh slide topic three 15:05 is challenges for maintaining groups whether the groups are free or paid the need for schedule and how to Hawk 15:12 discussions uh outside need for scheduled and ad hoc discussions outside of uh formal meeting we also have a 15:18 question coming in best practices for maintaining interest and do people drop out so over 30 years I could imagine 15:24 people have come and gone from Wise uh you have some instructors the uh senior 15:30 instructors instructing seniors sounds cool but do you do you work with others who are of in younger Generations that's 15:37 the one first question so so we don't uh we don't check IDs uh people of any age 15:43 can join and there are people who on occasion who are perhaps uh you know 15:51 parents who are stay at home and they want to do something during the day while the kids are in school they'll 15:57 they can join uh we've had just a few of those other similar organizations have 16:03 been more proactive in that space and have been able to engage younger people 16:08 I have had students from assumption University come to my classes to present 16:15 their projects so I've worked for the history Professor a couple of times where the topic that I 16:23 was teaching related to research that these students were doing in the course 16:29 of their studies and so they would come and present their material on 16:35 advertising in colonial America or you know studies of 16:41 advertisements in newspapers in the uh 16:46 you know in the colonial era so we've had some opportunities for cross-generational discussions as well 16:54 as of course you have education among seniors and you know invariably we 17:01 there's an attrition rate because uh of our population which you know people do 17:07 get old and they they be older and they become uh unable to participate uh but 17:14 nobody gets to play the unto old card with me I've had people in their 90s 17:19 attend classes uh ask good questions about the technology as well as about 17:25 how um you know how to do other stuff so 17:30 there's there's no upper age limit and we try as often as possible to bring in 17:37 younger people so this this brings to because you do a lot of content production whereas uh it 17:44 sounds like your organization anyway does a lot of content production and bringing in guest speakers or people who 17:50 can present things whereas Steve it sounds to me as though primarily your organization has grown up around the 17:56 fact which is an interesting fact that there's so many other people out there doing great content production why don't we spend some time learning about it and 18:03 we'll produce maybe some Hera content which is the discussions and we might so so tell a little bit but then you are 18:09 also talking Steve that you yourself felt motivated to create sort of an instruction manual how others can do 18:16 this and we I know at least one person in the periodicy project who was inspired by your work uh Fabio this is 18:23 and he said I'm gonna go try it so he went he went off and tried it so you've got this great kind of experimental 18:28 process that pretty much anyone anywhere in the world fabulous in Brazil can can replicate 18:34 um and you know report also on what works for them so it sounds like you are creating some kind content is that is 18:40 that uh is that gold um I could start by sort of contrasting 18:46 with the the wise model um and also getting back to your question what would it take if uh if you 18:52 wanted to participate and I'll I'll say that one thing about what what we have in the Lexington group uh and given that 18:59 has the name Lexington is that it it's really important it certainly was a key 19:04 factor when we started to meet in person uh because the kinds of discussions I 19:09 mean we're all used to zoom meetings like uh and other online meetings like this and and of course uh reminiscing 19:17 mostly about great uh gatherings in person 19:22 um and so given that the on the in-person component is is really 19:28 important even though we're online mostly now we still get together for beers or something now and then 19:34 especially when it's time to choose the next course when you really want to feel of the room and you know 19:40 a good sense of people's uh uh even just the minute uh facial expressions you 19:46 know are they are you on board with this that kind of thing so so that part of it is important now to get to your question 19:53 that you you just asked about creating content um that's I would call that sort of meta 19:58 content like it's like this this model has worked for us this pattern you might say I really like the pattern language 20:05 kind of uh language um since it's worked for us I'd like to see 20:11 if we could replicate this model I don't have any personal interest in it but it's worked so well and it's so much fun 20:16 for us uh I want to empower others to do this and it was really fantastic that 20:21 having gotten involved in the Pierogi meetings uh that Fabio took it up and 20:27 it's an interesting um segue a little bit to think about the 20:32 different kinds of this model there are flavors of it so the current one we have in Lexington 20:38 is a group of omnivores they're there for the long run looking forward to the next course as soon as one course is 20:44 finished um there's a there's another perfectly valid model uh and useful model for 20:51 which this works which is a group of professionals which is what Fabio did uh 20:57 he and a group of teachers took a course uh called I believe was called the bilingual mind 21:03 um and their English their their language teachers and um and so they found this course online 21:10 and met I believe it was uh once a week to discuss what they agreed to cover for 21:17 that week and it's just a good way of motivating uh yourselves collectively to do the do the work so the more technical 21:24 or and in fact that's how we started just to go back a bit I started the Lexington online Collective and I put up 21:31 all these possible courses from history to Art to machine learning 21:37 yeah this group of people that came together had never met at the library chose to do the hardest and the longest 21:43 course which is of course on machine learning that went probably three months 21:48 and by the time we were finished we went from seven people down to three people 21:53 because just normal attrition it's hard work and so the courses as I mentioned we do 22:00 now are more geared towards social interaction where I imagine that Fabio's 22:05 was really about doing the work right I'll mention one other 22:11 variant of this model which I I called paragogy 22:16 um because uh along the course of doing these courses there was one course like heavy duty 22:22 statistics course I wanted to take and I knew it was not going to be good for our group and so I just posted to the group 22:28 anybody want to take this with me it's just we're just going to be doing the homework and one person responded that's 22:34 exactly what I wanted to take and so she and I met at the library and we came up 22:39 with this model where we agreed that each week one of us would act as the professor 22:46 we've both studied the work but one of us had to sort of teach the course and of course you we all know that 22:54 having to teach something is the best way to learn it very thoroughly so that was another variant of 23:00 of of this Collective model that worked really well just one-on-one if I could just toss it so one of the 23:08 things that I just started I'll say playing with Khan Academy of course as 23:14 you know courses primarily geared to high school and younger ages uh 23:22 Sal Khan has just released a tutor an AI enabled tutor that is 23:30 integrated into Khan Academy to help students understand you know how you 23:37 know where they went wrong in a particular module I just got access to it and so I'm picking up on a statistics 23:43 course that I started a couple of years ago and didn't finish but it was very helpful in you know very specifically 23:51 showing me without giving me the answer showing me where my answer was wrong and 23:57 working as a one-on-one tutor and this is his model of being able to have a 24:04 scalable system so that you get one-on-one tutors for millions of 24:09 students and I think this uh so just as a segue on statistics I mean this is 24:17 just your basic statistics not nothing of the scale that would Steve was 24:22 talking about that's pretty exciting pretty exciting I mean it's very current because I see Khan Academy he posted this news May 1. so consider yourself to 24:29 be a part of The Cutting Edge I'd never heard of that was interesting along those lines is that uh Andrew ing who's 24:35 a who's a star in the world of machine learning uh actually founded Coursera 24:40 you know with this platform for which through which we take a lot of these courses and I saw a talk by him in which 24:46 he explained that they are even even in the early days very carefully tracks students progress and when they dropped 24:54 off and and they so they what they would adjust do a b tests and kind of things on on the quizzes to try to keep people 25:01 engaged and want to make the quiz too hard but not too easy and so that's been 25:06 a aspect of these at least the two that we've talked about of these platforms is 25:13 to try to ensure that people succeed to get through a course 25:18 so so um I'd like to do a number of things simultaneously one is uh Charlotte if we can move on to topic four and we have 25:25 that up on the screen the next one is uh if you're willing to jump into the discussion Charlotte I wanted to bring you into the discussion about uh topic 25:31 oriented discussions because you're also running um you know and have been for a while 25:37 helping run ipney the uh New England uh independent Publishers organization so 25:42 that's an interest group uh about book discussions about publishing books rather than reading books but here's here's a number of topics around special 25:49 interest groups book discussion writing groups special events travel um so I wondered if you had any comments 25:55 or questions for Carl and Steve uh based on your experiences with iffney or other other organizations yeah we well I've 26:02 been on the board and involved in in ipne uh independent Publishers of New 26:07 England for since so 2008 I think but it's been you know uh pretty 26:16 uh rough I there hasn't been a lot of progress in just sort of gelling a 26:22 you know truly engaged Dynamic community of people 26:27 um but there's been some success and I think one of the things that we've done 26:33 in recent years so we have six states right New England states 26:39 with varying numbers of members in each one but we decided to start Regional groups and 26:47 those have been kind of sputtering along since you know for the last 10 years maybe 26:52 um but Zoom has or you know online connections 26:58 have really enhanced that and we I think the 27:04 major thing is is to do it regularly so 27:09 I finally got you know a regular schedule for the Connecticut and we started a Connecticut group of Vermont 27:15 group who's really thriving and the Metro Boston group but we have other states that you know other regions that 27:23 we could develop I think those two things like 27:29 I don't know okay people just for this wide area it's 27:36 it's hard to to kind of form a common Bond or you know 27:42 and so we're starting with the regional things uh trying to 27:47 maintain attention before the show we were talking about you know my 27:53 definition of luxury is being able to do one thing at a time and we have so many things pulling at us and trying to 28:00 ensure that members of these learning groups can well you know to use Freight 28:08 Steve's phrase you can succeed part of it is to keep them engaged and part and 28:15 by that I also mean keep you know keep me engaged because you know I will I've 28:21 got the oh oh squirrel kind of response to so many different cool things and it 28:28 disrupts my ability to participate in any one thing really well right 28:39 for what is you know what people's like little thing 28:45 is you know and then try and address that once in a while you know yeah that makes sense you might find an 28:52 idea that works really well in one context for a while but doesn't doesn't work very well in another context or 28:57 indeed does work in another context again for a while so how do you how do you keep things Lively and moving uh 29:03 this this uh we're gonna have to leave keep this one moving um you can move to our closing uh slides just talk a little 29:10 bit about how we like to close out these conversations so yeah that is a comment on all the people who've contributed to 29:16 making this possible thank you everybody for uh participating in the podcast and 29:21 in the Pierogi project as as well and on the very next slide uh there's some 29:27 questions uh what did we expect to learn or make together what happened uh what are some different perspectives on what happened uh what did we learn and what 29:33 should we change going forward and I very much hope our guests will be able to stick around we've got one more slide uh the after discussion will take place 29:40 on meet.jit.si/peeragogy and there's other ways for you to get involved with the Peeragogy project at peeragogy.org so 29:47 have a look at that if you're interested there's loads of ways to find us on online but the discussion and I can 29:53 think of a few interesting next steps I'd like to discuss with uh guests will be taking place on that link in a few 29:59 minutes so um for those who can stick around I'll see you there thanks so much to Carl and Steve thank you Charlotte thank you thank you 30:06 very much all right see you on Jitsi