The challenges of the design pattern paradigm for the development of learning environments and experiences

This page: http://purl.org/planet/Groups.CAL09/

Symposium at CAL’09: Learning in Digital Worlds, March 23-25th 2009, Brighton

Designing learning environments and experiences is a key challenge for the CAL community. The design pattern paradigm in education integrates the knowledge of professional educators and designers of learning tools to support good pedagogy with technology. Pattern languages can be viewed as "practitioner's handbooks" that can be used by novices to improve their design processes.
The last decade has witnessed a growing acknowledgement of the paradigm for research and practice in the learning sciences (e.g., Bergin, 2000; Goodyear et al, 2004; Brouns et al. 2005; Retalis et al, 2006; Winters and Mor, 2008).
The purpose of this symposium is to bring together the community of researchers engaged in using pattern-based approaches to design research in education to reflect on the state-of-the-art. While there have been many successes, pattern research in education faces a number of key challenges:

• What kind of evidence do we need to have to know that a pattern is of general use in design?
• What are the barriers for making a pattern language a useful tool for the broader community of educators and educational researchers?
• As the pattern approach becomes more successful, how can we ensure that pattern authors build on each other’s work, fostering a culture of knowledge accumulation?
• How is the pattern approach related to other means of knowledge sharing?

This symposium will focus on an open debate led by international recognised researchers across Europe. We will open with an overview introducing the field, followed by 4-5 short position papers, leaving the main bulk of time for discussion, and concluding with a response by the organisers. The discussion will be structured as a panel debate around preselected questions.
CAL conference attendants are invited to offer their own position papers and questions for the panel. Please leave a comment on this page if you wish to contribute.

Symposium introduction

This symposium has been organised by members of the JISC funded Planet project which has recently been using a design pattern approach in the domain of web2.0 technologies, social software, media, services and tools. We have drawn together a group of design pattern experts from across Europe to address the challenges of the design pattern approach, or paradigm, to the development of learning environments and experiences.

We believe that anyone unfamiliar with design patterns will find the talks provide an excellent entry point into understanding what patterns are and what they can and cannot do.

Patterns themselves are a way of capturing proven design solutions to recurrent problems. They are a way of sharing good practices that have been tried and tested in real settings. Unlike the development of ‘guidelines’ or ‘models’, patterns are able to bridge thought and action in a purposeful manner. They are written as problem solution pairs and elaborate relevant contextual information. They describe and how, when and where a particular solution can be applied. But the beauty of patterns, using the words of Christopher Alexander, lies in that they provide a “solution that can be used a million times over without ever doing it the same way twice”.

Alexander’s seminal work was based in the discipline of architecture but the design pattern approach is one that has been adopted by researchers and workers in a range of fields – most notably software design and HCI. And now more recently in education with a variety of funded projects that have worked on pedagogical patterns, CSCW and e-learning patterns and so on. Yet despite the wider adoption and increasing appreciation of design patterns approaches there remain questions about the methodological grounding for pattern generation and concerns about the validity of design patterns as a problem-solving tool. These are some of the key areas that are addressed in these papers.

The papers

Paper 1: Nicole Schadewitz - Identifying design patterns in international collaborative learning - two contrasting case studies.

This paper contrasts two methodological approaches of design pattern mining in international learning communities.
In both cases, a certain doubt about the validity of patterns and therefore the pattern approach persists. Increasing validity by means of community and expert reviews, referencing to related pattern collections and  and triangulation of data sets and theories were perceived as promising approaches. But questions remain:

• What is the role of methodology and theory in pattern mining in learning communities?
• Are there universal patterns supporting the design of in international learning communities? If not, how can a pattern capture the success of a solution but also report on limitations across learning contexts?

Paper 2: Yishay Mor and Steven Warburton - Planet: bringing learning design knowledge to the forefront

This paper elaborates a methodology for sharing expertise using a design patterns approach. We - learners, teachers, researchers - work in settings where the accelerated progress of technology means that not just learning is changing, but the nature of change itself is changing. The question we explore is how can we effectively respond to developments that occur at such rapid pace. Mor & Winters have argued that design patterns and pattern languages hold a promise in this respect, and propose a workshop model for participatory development of pattern languages in education (Mor & Winters, 2007; 2008). The Pattern Language Network project (http://www.patternlanguagenetwork.org) has further developed this methodology, and a set of on-line tools to support it, for pattern-based design research in education. This methodology is being used by communities of practitioners, developers and researchers to capture and share their expertise and examples of good practice as reusable design knowledge. Here, we show the value of this methodology as a way forward in tackling key design issues in teaching and learning supported by Web 2.0 technologies and virtual world spaces. <div style="width:400px;text-align:left" id="__ss_477686">