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Advantages of Peer Learning

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Being that I’m currently taking part in a 6 month peer learning course as an adult I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in continuing learning beyond school.

It tends to be that peoples learning goals are often less academic though and touch on more personal aspects of them selves and the world around them.

Here the organisation I’m participating through: https://www.enrolyourself.com/

anyone have a good resource for finding groups interested in studying same stuff as you? meetup.com seems fairly limited on this front in my area (DC)

That was a total waste of time. Peer learning has some major flaws which various different systems have been able to overcome. A centralized learning process is always better than decentralized one from my experience.

Your dismissiveness and lack of argumnts is not conducive to discussion. For starters you could elaborate why you found the article a total waste of time, and what flaws and advantages you see in various systems, including peer learning. Finally, why is a centralized learning process always better?

major flaws like?

Like the need for someone more advanced in the field than your are. The blind leading the blind doesn't seem to be an effective educational strategy.

A blind person will never learn to navigate his environment if he is always lead around by a person who can see, so the blind leading the blind seems like a good education strategy.

Playing on words is not a good argument. I bet you can’t teach me Elamite right know. And if you learn a bit of it for that purpose, it will still be vastly inferior than a course, book or video made by a specialist of the language, which had time to reflect on his own knowledge.

My point is that trying to learn without a teacher serves a purpose, it isn't good to never have a teacher but neither is always having a teacher. Peer learning isn't about cutting out the teacher, it is to let students try to figure out a few things among themselves as a group.

That's just not a valid argument, you can use expert sources and books and courses, as you practice Peer Learning,

I've seen the blind leading the blind walking around in the city before. They both had walking sticks. I assume the one had slightly better vision than the other or maybe had been through that part of town before, but it did make me laugh.

not quite, this analogy won't fit, in the process of Peer Learning, it is more about discovering together, facilitated by resources and experiences that you can share with your peer.

This may be a good pattern for the average learner. If you have vastly superior motivation or ability, or prior relatable knowledge the time spend with others is mostly pure waste, like grand parent stated.

There is no silver bullet in education, so it’s quite annoying to have a solution branded like it will solve every problem and is better than everything else while in reality it’s only suited to a few profiles of learner. And of course, SEO article like that doesn’t bother stating any implicit assumptions that had.

PS: I’m working in a research field related to education so I read lot of papers about it. Lot of bullshit is said even in the field, and ever more by people outside.

time spent with others is not always "pure waste", Peer Learning can let you see the things you already see but now with a different perspective, from a different angle. Besides that it gives you enough experience to practice real world collaborations. And yes I agree, there's no silver bullet in education.

They don't need to be much more advanced than you. Also the article is talking about adults not children and also adults who have chosen the topic that they wish to learn so it is reasonable to expect that they will put some effort into the task. Very often it is much more effective to have another student explain something to another student than have the teacher try to explain it to a whole class or lecture theatre simply because the student realizes which bits are difficult because they have recently gone through the process of learning it. Anyway, this surely does not happen in a vacuum, both peers can surely use other resources in addition.

In a slightly different but related field in my career as an electronics engineer and software developer I have always found it valuable to have manuals written largely by users who have themselves recently learnt how to use my products rather than trying to write it all myself. Of course I give assistance and do a lot of proofreading but having the users teach each other is efficient because they can concentrate on the things that are actually important rather than the ones that were difficult, expensive, or intellectually interesting to create.

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