Activity – Come up with a plan for your work and an agreement, or informal contract, for your group. You can use the suggestions in this guide as a starting point, but your first task is to revise the plan to suit your needs. It might be helpful to ask: What are you interested in learning? What is your primary intended outcome? What problem do you hope to solve?  How collaborative does your project need to be? How will the participants’ expertise in the topic vary? What sort of support will you and other participants require? What problems won’t you solve?

Technology – Familiarize yourself with the collaboration tools you intend to use (e.g. WordPress, Git and LaTeX, YouTube, GIMP, a public wiki, a private forum, or something else) and create a first post, edit, or video introducing yourself and your project(s) to others in the worldwide peeragogy community.

Suggested Resources – The Peeragogy Handbook, parts I (‘Introduction’) and II (‘Peer Learning’). You may also want to work through a short lesson called Implementing Paragogy, from the early days before the Peeragogy project was convened. For a succinct theoretical treatment, please refer to our literature review, which we have adapted into a Wikipedia page.

Further Reading – Boud, D. and Lee, A. (2005). ‘Peer learning’ as pedagogic discourse for research education. Studies in Higher Education, 30(5):501–516.

Observations from the Peeragogy project – We had a fairly weak project structure at the outset, which yielded mixed results. One participant said: “I definitely think I do better when presented with a framework or scaffold to use for participation or content development.” Yet the same person wrote with enthusiasm about models of entrepreneurship, saying she was “freed of the requirement or need for an entrepreneurial visionary.” In short,