Pedagogy of Simultaneity (PoS): Exploring learning in the intersecting, concurring spaces

Background and a Dialogue of Ideas

Before I go too far, the PoS  site can be found here.

I have been working for the last year, casually, with Pekka Ihanainen (HAAGA-HELIA School of Vocational Teacher Education, Helsinki, Finland) on learning that takes place in simultaneous scenarios, ie how we process and make meaning from environments where many varaibles are being processed at the same time, some conscious, some unconscious, some reflective, some merely observational, etc. This has been a rewarding collaboration as it wasn’t governed by schedules or deadlines or organizational commitments; it was just merely two people who met over an idea and who discussed and discussed and discussed. Reminds me of the type of collaboration that occurred with the MobiMOOC Research Team, but with less structure (ie, no course congealing the actors). What spurred the original interaction was Pekka’s paper that had me thinking about the intersections of time, space, and opportunity in learning.

• Ihanainen, Pekka, & John Moravec. “Pointillist, cyclical, and overlapping: Multidimensional facets of time in online education.” The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning [Online], 12.7 (2011): 27-39. Web. 27 Nov. 2011

That discussion led to me tweeting a few things about it and a blog post and then a collaboration which has since found its way to email and Google Drive/Docs and a few other spaces. So for the last year we have been bouncing around ideas of how learning agents interact and how we interact through them and the general need for some learning pedagogy to account for things happening simultaneously. So, our conversations have sort of drifted into this: a Pedagogy of Simultaneity (PoS). Is it a real thing? Not sure. Is it distinct from any other pedagogy? Not sure. But what we are sure of is that it is time to open the discussion to anyone willing to discuss, to bounce off ideas off of others and see where this discussion takes us. Hence the invitation.

Pedagogy of Simultaneity: What it is so far

Briefly, and this is the text drawn from the site we created:

The Pedagogy of Simultaneity (PoS) is an attempt to define learning and a related pedagogy that accounts for the simultaneous engagements that occur in any given learner’s environment. It is an attempt to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow and make these challenges visible in a pedagogy. Trust, discussion and collage are the carrying features of learning and pedagogy based on PoS.  We hold them as the key concepts, the observable phenomena and related activities of learning in PoS. Behind these concepts, phenomena, and activity, we attempt to account for the empowering energies and layers of time, space, and social presence. All of these interact simultaneously. That is why we use the term Pedagogy of Simultaneity. We think it is worthwhile to explore developing a pedagogy that accounts for all of these as they naturally and simultaneously occur.

Please note that these ideas are not (nor could they be) fully formulated. This is not a ‘thing’ as such, but rather an idea that something more complex is taking place in learning than is reflected in our current pedagogies. PoS is never complete. It will be written and used in the way people join the process and take PoS for their own practices.

So how this PoS is distinguishable from any other pedagogy (if at all) remains to be seen. We just know that the more people in the discussion, the better. So if you are interested in joining, participating, and collaborating on a paper or two (if this pans out to something), then please do read on. Pekka made a nice presentation on some of the salient characteristics of what we see emerging here.

Call for participation: How to join

We invite all like-minded and critical people to help us compose and make explicit a pedagogy of simultaneity (PoS).  The site itself is public, but you need to be invited to make edits and comments so please email Pekka for an invitation at ihanainenpekka ( at ) gmail.com.

The site can be found here, but you need to be invited to make edits, comments, etc. So if you are interested, join us. If you think we are barking up the wrong tree, tell us. If you have some additional items to add to our bibliography (which is just a skeletal at the moment, but never fear, we are basing this on existing theory), please send them to us or add them. If you are just curious to see how an open collaboration works, then please to let us know. I have found it to be rewarding beyond belief, both here and with MobiMOOC. It is incredibly exhilarating to meet with someone over an idea, just an idea, and with no complicating agenda. Just walking it through and seeing where it takes you. Join us if that sounds worthwhile.