Reflections on 3 types of learning: peer to peer, professor to student, and mentored learning.

How do people learn most effectively?  As a student and a future teacher, I'm fascinated by this question.  So taking Professor  Burton's class and learning about badges on my own have been thrilling peeks into new educational models.  Badges often represent a peer learning model (like at Mozilla's Peer 2 Peer University) that seems in sharp contrast to the more top-down, professor to student model we are used to in traditional education environments like the university.  Both learning models have advantages.  Peer learning promotes initiative, independent thought, and collaboration with others. The professor to student model delivers high quality information and transmits knowledge from the valuable experience of an expert.  Professor Burton's class is a good mix of both learning models, combining the advantages of each.

One of the things I love about our Digital Culture class is that a lot of the discussion and homework for the class revolves around our relatively self-directed learning and the resulting connections we make and ideas we create.  We get to learn from each other and be inspired by each other's good ideas.  I'm really excited about our semester group projects which we design ourselves and about the chance to participate in other group projects on an advisory basis.  I've never had a final project that was so participatory and relevant-- people  other than me and my professor, if only my other classmates, are going to see my work, and hopefully some people outside my class will see it as well.  I've always enjoyed school, but I'm extra excited about my work for this class because I determine a lot of it for myself and I get to discuss it with others and get feedback.

But another of the strengths of the class is that we aren't just left alone to learn for ourselves.  Professor Burton's lectures introduce us to new ideas we wouldn't find so quickly on our own.  With his expert knowledge he provides context and direction for our self directed learning, helping to nudge our exploration and creation in productive directions.  One way he helps us learn is by establishing criteria so we know how to judge our work and so we're encouraged at the right time to move from the relatively cushy development stage to some formalization of our ideas.

In a sense, the Digital Culture class gives us the best of both worlds: initiative and creativity-building peer learning, and the context, direction, and expert knowledge offered by professor to student learning.  Today I've been thinking about a third learning model: mentored learning.  On Jessica Lee's recent blog post, "Badges and Adapting Education in a Digital World," which discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the open, often peer-based learning that happens online, "William" left a comment that got me thinking about mentored learning: 

When I look back at all my education, the experiences that most stick with me where the ones that produced something large, tangible and objectively valuable (having intrinsic merit) as a by-product, such as a research paper or thesis paper or production-grade computer program. The point being was that it was the extensive, mentored effort at delivering something significant through an end to end process of design, construct, review iterations that had to meet a real-world bar - this "labor" over time was the realization of the instruction.

This "supervised labor to delivery of significant things" is what seems to be missing from any easy and convenient open-house of content.

I'm not willing to throw out open or peer learning, but I think William makes a good point about the importance of mentored learning on significant projects. I'm currently writing a collection of poetry and working with a faculty member who helps me revise my poems.  I'm also taking a poetry class from this faculty member in which the students critique each other's work.  While I appreciate and learn from my classmates' feedback, my faculty mentor's feedback is invaluable because of her experience and knowledge from years of being a published poet.  I predict working with her will be one of the most significant experiences of my undergraduate education. 

Could mentored learning as well as peer to peer learning become part of the online learning experience and not just something available at a university?  With the resources available on the net, I think it could definitely be possible to connect with experts or experienced enthusiasts and set up meaningful mentored learning relationships with them online. That's probably one of the relatively untapped possibilities for online learning. It would be great to see a website aimed at connecting mentors and mentees. I can see how mentored learning could enhance and complement the valuable peer learning that goes on in many open online learning models.  A mentor could easily issue a badge to a learner who had completed a significant supervised project.

What do you think?  How could mentored learning enhance the online learning experience?  How could we use the Internet to make it happen more often?