User:Charles Jeffrey Danoff/Peeragogy Monthly Wrap - January 2020

On this beautiful, sunny February 29th in Chicago I wish you both a happy Black History Month and happy leap day, dear reader! Welcome to our first e-zine issue of the decade!! Since we last published a wrap we've found some ways to keep ourselves busy! :-)

Late last year a longtime peeragogue, Roland, led a reading group with the third edition of the Handbook as a text. They posted eight videos, plus left dozens of helpful comments and suggestions we can incorporate into the fourth edition! You can watch the videos on YouTube at the links below:


 * 1) First reading
 * 2) Second reading
 * 3) Third reading
 * 4) Fourth reading
 * 5) Fifth reading
 * 6) Sixth reading
 * 7) DAO discussion
 * 8) Final reading

The energy those peers created with their regular meetings was contagious and it infected out other activities! On the tech side, activity picked up in the Peeragogy Github repositories and we've been experimenting with new software applications. KeyBase is an instant messaging client with a clean User Interface and Jitsi is a lightweight video conferencing app. We are intrigued, but the new tools have not replaced Google Hangouts or Zoom, both of which we still use regularly. Another app we still use a lot of is Google Docs, but we wanted something that synced better with those GitHub commits so we're playing with Floobits and HackMD.

One example of a HackMD pad is the one being used to organize content for a course based around the Peeragogy Handbook, 3rd Edition that Joe is leading. In addition to providing educational value for current participants and improvements for the handbook, the course is also a test run for one Joe proposed to run at a university this Fall.

When people come together for Joe's course or in other communities, guidelines are often something that are written down and discussed. We made our first attempt at establishing community guidelines and would welcome your thoughts, dear reader!

In October we presented our work of design fiction at the Anticipation Conference in Oslo. Charlotte and Joe joined remotely and volunteers in the room helped me do the reading. We got feedback that our approach was too prescriptive giving lines to performers. Next time we plan to give the participants more agency over their performance by formally giving them time to interpret and adapt the content if they want. Hopefully that will make the whole experience more peeragogical!

One of the most interesting sessions I attended was "Future-making in education through social presencing theatre: An awareness-based anticipatory methodology" which made use of Social Presencing Theater. The structured approach to expressing what you're feeling in movement physically impacted me. Joe and I liked it so much we incorporated it into a submission we finished in December for another conference!

We put our heartbeat pattern into practice by finding common times we could meet across time zones. We successfully put it into practice in January and met multiple times a week! I also committed to writing these monthly, so please check back in early March for a fresh issue!!

To close out with rhythm, please treat your ears to these two tracks which made it only our collaborative Monthly Mixtape:


 * Andy Fox featuring Laura: Fly Away
 * The Knife: Heartbeats