Why UnPeeragogy

A personal account

I was part of the Peeragogy project for years.

I contributed to the Handbook from the very beginning — from the first edition onward. I genuinely believed in the idea — that people could learn, create and organize knowledge together without placing a teacher or an institutional authority at the center.

Peeragogy gave me a language for something I had already experienced: learning happens sideways, not downward. I still think that's true.

But spending time with an idea is different from reading about it.

The patterns were useful. The principles made sense. The intentions were good.

And in real groups, things were often much messier than the theory suggested.

People lose motivation. Some contribute far more than others. Groups spend enormous energy trying to reach consensus. Coordination quietly becomes management. Difficult conversations get avoided because preserving the group feels more important than questioning it. And sometimes a group looks perfectly collaborative while very little is happening.

I didn't find these contradictions interesting because they proved Peeragogy wrong. I found them interesting because they made the theory more interesting — by showing me what it couldn't explain.

So I started asking a different question.

Not how can we make Peeragogy work better?

But: what happens when Peeragogy doesn't work?

Not theoretically. Practically. What happens to motivation when motivation disappears? What happens to participation when participation becomes unequal? What happens to consensus when the group needs to make a decision — and can't? What happens to self-organization when nobody wants to coordinate? What happens to cooperation when interests quietly diverge?

And what happens when the person who keeps questioning the process becomes more useful to the group than the person who keeps the process comfortable?

I don't have definitive answers. That's why I'm still asking.

The Perturbator

This changed the way I think about disagreement.

For a long time, disagreement looks like a problem that collaborative systems should solve. I'm increasingly interested in the opposite possibility: maybe some disagreement should remain unresolved. Maybe the person who interrupts the consensus is not disrupting the learning process. Maybe they are making it visible.

I call this person the Perturbator.

Not the smartest person. Not the leader. Not someone who is necessarily right. Someone willing to say: wait — why are we assuming this? Or: this isn't working. Or: are we collaborating, or are we performing collaboration?

The Perturbator is useful precisely because they introduce uncertainty into a system that has become too comfortable with its own assumptions. A group that cannot tolerate dissent may be harmonious. It may also be completely wrong — and never know.

This is where the two-column method comes from. Take a pattern. Take an assumption. Put it back into contact with reality. On one side, the original theory. On the other, the friction produced when that theory encounters actual human behaviour. Between them: the reader — asked not to choose which side is correct, but to notice where the two stop agreeing. That gap is the experiment.

Looking back, I don't see my relationship with Peeragogy as a rejection.

It is closer to continued inquiry. Peeragogy gave me the first framework. UnPeeragogy became the uncomfortable second question — the one you ask when you've been inside something long enough to see where it doesn't hold.

And that second question opened another door. If collaboration itself can be examined, disrupted, redesigned — what happens when the participants are no longer only human? What happens when an artificial intelligence becomes part of the cognitive process? Not as a provider of answers, but as another source of disagreement, comparison, distortion, friction.

That question led me toward Pyragogy.

I don't see these as three competing theories. I see them as three stages of an ongoing experiment.

Peeragogy asked: how can we learn and create knowledge together?

UnPeeragogy asks: what happens when we examine the assumptions behind that collaboration — including its failures, contradictions and uncomfortable parts?

Pyragogy asks: what happens when this process of collaborative inquiry includes artificial intelligence as a cognitive participant?