Learning Swap Shop

Peer-to-peer technology, in the form of systems such as Napster, created a popular revolution that just for while threatened the smug complacency of the media industry and spawned talk of the next ‘Internet revolution’. With Napster on the retreat in the face of a barrage of lawsuits, the P2P bandwagon may be grinding to a halt, but the potential for positive application of the power of peer-to-peer communication over networks is still alluring, not least to the e-learning industry. In this chapter, I look beneath the P2P hype to see just what can be achieved by removing the chains and allowing learners to ‘do it for themselves’.

Learners are doing it for themselves

Wouldn’t it be nice if, to fulfill our training responsibilities, all we had to do was organise a forum for the exchange of skills and knowledge? A marketplace in which learners could exploit their talents by helping to develop them in others and overcome the gaps in their own skillset by locating colleagues who can help them out – a sort of learning swap shop. All the training – the learning content, if you like, was designed and delivered by learners themselves, while your contribution was merely facilitational – bringing peers together so they can help themselves.

Some of you may say that this vision is pure fantasy and that no learning can take place without the expert guiding hand of the trainer. Yet surely, much if not most of what we learn, we learn informally from our friends and work colleagues in much this way. Even formal learning events can be organised this way. I personally attended a series of one-week development workshops back in the early 80s, in which members of the group posted on a flipchart at the beginning of the week: the contribution they could make to the topic in hand and the gaps they had in their own understanding. The timetable for the week was then negotiated as a series of mini-presentations and discussions run by learners themselves with only occasional interventions by the tutors. Contrary to many expectations, the result wasn’t anarchy, but a rich learning experience and a strong sense of community. If we’d known of the term, we might even have called this ‘peer-to-peer learning’

The phrase ‘peer-to-peer’ has, of course, been much in the news over the past few years in the context of network technology. Let’s be more specific – we’re really talking about Napster and all the fuss it caused. In case the phenomenon of MP3 music has passed you by, let me summarise. In the way it was originally configured, the Napster website provided access to a database of MP3 (that’s highly compressed) music files on the hard disks of its many members. Let’s say you wanted a copy of the Eagles’ Hotel California (for research purposes, of course, not just because you didn’t want to pay for it). You could search the Napster database, find a member that was currently online and who had an MP3 copy of the song and download it directly from their computer to yours. Note that Napster didn’t keep a database of music files themselves, just details of the songs that members were prepared to make available. Napster operated the marketplace, although it was rather a unique marketplace in which nobody paid for anything; and that’s what got the record companies and the musicians that they represent rather peeved. So much so that they stopped it. Napster lives on, but with major restrictions on what can be swapped free of charge. As a result, practically nobody uses it anymore.