The three distinguishing features of constructivist theory are claims that:[5] These are clearly meaningful propositions in a social context with sustained relationships, where people work on projects or tasks that are collaborative or otherwise shared.
Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed advocated a more equitable relationship between teachers and students, one in which information is questioned and situated in political context, and all participants in the classroom work together to create knowledge.
Paulo Blikstein, Assistant Professor of Education at Stanford University wrote in Travels in Troy with Freire: Technology as an Agent of Emancipation[9] that through exploratory building activities, “Not only did students become more autonomous and responsible, they learned to teach one another.” Yochai Benkler explains how the now-ubiquitous computer helps us produce and process knowledge together with others in his book, The Wealth of Networks.
Rita Kop and Adrian Hill, in their critique of connectivism,[10] state that: In global health, peer learning has emerged as a significant approach for spreading evidence-based practices at scale.
For example, in Côte d'Ivoire, a peer learning initiative reached health workers across 85% of the country's districts within two weeks, leading to locally-led innovations in community engagement.
Davidson and Goldberg introduce “Ten Principles for the Future of Learning,” which include self-learning, horizontal structures, and open source education.
[14] (p. 156) Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum discuss implications for the realm of moral philosophy in their 2006 essay, "Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue".
[15] They argue that the “socio-technical systems” of today’s Internet make it easier for people to role-model and adopt positive, virtuous behaviors on a large scale.
Joseph Corneli and Charles Jeffrey Danoff proposed the label “paragogy” to describe a collection of “best practices of effective peer learning”.
That’s the message, that everyone can bring something to the conversation.”[3] In numerous public talks, Schmidt argues that current educational models are "broken" (particularly on the basis of the high cost of university-level training).
[20] Jeff Young’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "When Professors Print Their Own Diplomas",[21] sparked a conversation about the necessity of formal degrees in an age when class lectures can be uploaded for free.
Although other more recent work has shown that non-monetary rewards or acknowledgement can make a difference in performance (for certain populations of peer producers),[29] the exact motivations for going out of the way to teach or tutor someone else are not clearly understood.