(2014-09-10) Caulfield Course Design Patterns

Mike Caulfield has discovered Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language model (see Alexander Patterns), and is chewing over how it could apply to Course Design. So if the patterns are the same, how do designs end up different? Because you start with different constraints... Your students have certain backgrounds, various strengths. Your institution has certain facilities and your technology has certain affordances. Just as a limited number of grammar rules produce an infinite number of sentences based on the needs of the moment, so learning design patterns combined with the circumstances and aims of instruction can produce infinitely expressive learning designs... What excites me about this is it is a way to combine research and practice without succumbing to an industrial paradigm.

Sept12 update: he ponders getting the pattern at the right level. The trick with patterns is they must be concrete enough that you can “think with them” but broad enough that they can generate unexpected solutions.

Oct23: he gave a big keynote at N We Learn: yesterday I was looking at this and thinking the real title should be “How to Fight Big Design (Big Design Up Front) Without Becoming a Design Anarchist.” He connects it to Ward Cunningham's work in software Design Pattern-s and Agile Software Development. He notes that challenge that agile/Emergent EduTech systems have in not getting driven out by over-specified systems (cough LMS): Turns out WSU was a leader in this stuff. Papers, keynotes, conferences. Early — and impressive — use of a university wiki. The use of worldware for ePortfolios. Student blogging and course blogs in 2006 or so. Leadership changed. People were moved, rearranged, let go. Servers were shut down, and student work deleted. And this experimentation was obliterated so fully that I only came on it by accident... In programming, they found ways for people to bring that organic experience of programming alone into programming with people. In programming, they found a place in between 1970s exburb strip mall loops and the sterility of the 1980s mall.