User:Arided/DistributedUniversity

I’m thinking about designs for a “distributed university”. This should also include designs for a &quot;research programme&quot; that asks: how can this actually work? So far in the Peeragogy project, we've assembled a catalog of patterns, anti-patterns, and use cases related to peer produced peer learning, so we have a significant head start in &quot;design&quot; for distributed collaborations of this type. But can we use our “pattern language” to produce systems that “actually work”?

Looking at the pattern language, the most natural place to start is at the center, with the roadmap. This immediately raises further questions, like who will contribute to building the roadmap and crossing things off? What else is going on out in the world that we can connect up with, remix, and reuse? And, do others share the basic vision that building a distributed university would be a good idea? -- or is this somehow “barking up the wrong tree”?

Let’s start by asking what the “distributed university” really is, and what it would mean to make one. On a certain level, we’re talking about something like an “Invisible College”. These historically virtual bodies tend to find parallel concrete embodiment in real cooperative configurations -- like the Hartlib Circle, or, later, the Royal Society. In the 2010s, there may again be be a broad virtual alignment of interests having to do with research, education, and information exchange. As with the historical Invisible College, new concrete arrangements can serve those “interested in profiting from science.” Caroline Wagner has argued that such a realignment is in progress “with the shift from big science to global networks.”

To make this shift with any degree of conscious planning requires a level of self-reflectiveness that (for now) seems relatively unpopular among Western scientists (even wiki researchers). Indeed, it may be a downright “dangerous idea”. The coy response from TEL researchers could look something like this: &quot;You seem to be suggesting that we're doing something wrong by providing learning infrastructures and learning analytics ‘as a service’. Why so negative?&quot; While both “open access” and Software as a Service do indeed provide some interesting opportunities for collaboration and reflection, they are really only the very beginnings of a Science of Science. Ultimately, a wide range of methods and approaches should be deployed to build a better understanding.

Here I will draw on the paper &quot;Improving educational research: Toward a more useful, more influential, and better-funded enterprise&quot; by Burkhardt and Schönfeld. I will also draw on my earlier Open Letter to Researchers. The plan will be to move beyond these, using the model of “group informatics” proposed by Sean Goggins et al., together with our Peeragogy Patterns, to design a simple research programme and infrastructure designed to support a multi-method Science of Science. I plan to validate and extend this model via a participatory design process with “real scientists”. The outcome will be a blueprint for “Peeragogy.EDU”