Yesterday, Stephen Downes replied to my most recent post on educational pattern languages: Michael Feldstein is on the right track, mostly, with his exploration of the applicability of pettern language to learning. In this brief item, he asks, “Can we deduce sort of generative grammar of educational experience that enables us to string together these […]
Academics and Academia
The "Academics and Academia" category covers topics related the ways in which colleges and universities function that are relevant to technology-supported education. One key aspect covered here is pedagogy—how people teach—and how technology impacts teaching and learning.
But this category also includes more institutional aspects that are relevant to technology-supported education, such as how campus leadership supports (or doesn't support) new initiatives, politics and bureaucracy that impact these efforts, and so on.
Finally, "Academics and Academia" covers commercial and non-profit services that provide support for technology-supported education initiatives, such as Online Program Management (OPM) companies.
Pattern Languages as Human Languages
Here is the text of a speech that pattern language inventor Christopher Alexander gave in 1996 to The 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA). There is a lot –a lot— in this speech that makes it interesting and fulfilling reading (and entirely applicable to online learning and knowledge sharing). I’ll […]
Educational Conversation Pattern: Role-Playing Simulation
Here is another tool that affords a particular educational conversation pattern. This time the pattern is role-playing simulation I may have to start a new site theme for this stuff. (Found via thee-Learning Centre.)
Web Collaborator
A couple of posts ago I briefly touched on the idea of developing a pattern language of educational conversations and building tools that support particular patterns. Web Collaborator is a good example of what this might look like. Basically, it’s a single discussion thread tied to a single wiki page. The wiki is for collaborative […]
digital amalgam :Going Wide or Going Deep? Blogs or Discussion
Jim Woodel has a thoughtful blog post in response to the Complese class blog that I noted in my own last post. Here’s a sample: I really, really like the idea of either discussion tools or blog tools that give the instructor some ability to manipulate display based on pedagogy. I’ll have to do some […]
Pattern Languages and Learning Objects
It took me a while to find it on my shelves, but I finally dug out Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community, which is a book on applying Christopher Alexander’s ideas to software engineering. For a good chunk of this book, you could take out words like “software,” “code,” and “objects,” and substitute […]
Let's All Live In Jay's House
I’m insanely jealous. It turns out that Jay Cross lives in a house built by the great architect Christopher Alexander. I’m a huge fan of Alexander’s work. Furthermore, I think anyone who does instructional design should read Alexander’s book. No, I don’t mean The Nature of Order, which is the book that Jay is apparently […]