Critical Review 3

In her essay Amateur-to-Amateur, Kiri Miller surveys instances and trends within A2A pedagogy in the social, Web 2.0 era.  Her case studies include a teenager teaching conga on YouTube, an ashtanga yoga blogger, and a radio producer turned piano tutorial guru helping once-piano students reclaim a connection to the instrument on their own terms.  Miller’s discussion approaches the A2A phenomenon from a variety of angles.  She demonstrates its power to subvert traditional student-teacher relationships, empowering students to question how they are being taught and engage with the material in new ways, often with the guidance of other students and hobbyists.  Miller also suggests that A2A pedagogy is advantageous in relation to practices that are already established through years of traditional teaching.  These practices have established, usually kinesthetic, means of communicating material to students.  This gives people common ground for communication over the internet and it simultaneously demands that people find new ways of thinking about and communicating the material.  A2A pedagogy has created a digital counterpart to many physical-based practices.  In doing so, it has given rise to new sources of community and new tools for crowdsourcing introspection within those communities.

Is the strength of A2A pedagogy its ability to harness people’s innate affinity for self-directed learning?

The entrepreneur in me is begging me to ask: could you imagine a website that could do a better job than YouTube at enabling people to learn from each other online by creating digital communities based around different practices?