General talk about software patterns

[Christian Köppe <christian.koppe AT hu.nl>]

For your information.

Regards,
Christian Köppe


The deadline for submissions for the International Workshop on Educational
Patterns has been extended to August 31 2012. Please see for details below
the original Call for Papers.

More information can be found on the website www.educationalpatterns.org

========================================================

This is the Call for Papers for the International Workshop on Educational
Patterns “Patterns: Thinking about new opportunities for pedagogy” on the
8th and 9th of November 2012 at the Danube University in Krems/ Austria.
As you were a participant of an xPLoP conference or an E-Learning workshop
we thought that you might be interested in this international workshop
too.

Motivation
Many pedagogical patterns are documented and there are case studies
describing their successful application. However, there are still some
open questions which might be the reason why these patterns did not get
the broad attention they deserve.

The main goal of the workshop is to gain a deeper and more grounded
understanding of the applicability of the ideas of Christopher Alexander
in the field of education.

In his latest work Christopher Alexander describes 15 fundamental
properties that make structures more alive and whole. These properties are
already described for being applicable in many different domains including
education. However, many of these applications seem to be highly
speculative and therefore not reliable.

Topics
The workshop addresses three main topics.

Topic 1: The meaning of Christopher Alexander's 15 properties for
education. This topic aims at examining the meaning of the 15 properties
described by Alexander in The Nature of Order for educational purposes
with the focus on one property or a small subset of them. It is hereby
important to make this applicability more specific and well-grounded in
order to show that indeed the properties are – or are not – applicable.
Possible questions to be addressed are:
Can specific properties be used for designing educational actions and how
can this applicability be supported?
What do the properties mean in the field of education?
Can we find examples of the properties in successful educational
scenarios? Does this application still match with the original ideas of
Alexander?

Topic 2: The specific volatile structures of educational situations. A
characteristic of patterns in the domain of education is their
volatility, because the structures of a pattern instance which evolve
based on social interactions are flexible and short-living. It is
therefore difficult to document or measure them in a consistent way.
Furthermore, the context of educational situations, ranging from short
interactions to curriculum design, is always different, which makes the
application of patterns less predictable. Possible questions to be
addressed are:
How can educational patterns be documented in a way which takes their
volatility into account?
What consequences does the volatility has for the conscious application of
educational patterns?
Can we generalize these volatile structures in the pattern format at all?

Topic 3: The empirical ground for educational patterns.
Educational situations are generally hard to generalize. Much empirical
research in education are case studies which contain (too) many details
and are therefore hard to generalize with respect to different educational
situations. Other studies mainly contain general pedagogical principles
and offer not much help in concrete situations. Patterns can connect these
two views, but there still are open questions such as:
How can educational patterns be empirically justified?
Which pattern mining methods are appropriate for research in this field?
As educational situations are highly dependent on their context, how can
they be reliably generalized?


Submissions
We call for high-quality and innovative submissions, which address one or
multiple of the above described topics and already are in a mature state.
These submissions form the basis for deeper discussions in smaller work
groups whereby the authors are expected to present their ideas in a short
presentation.

Submissions can be made via e-mail to 
workshop AT educationalpatterns.org.
 At
least one of the authors of accepted papers is required to participate at
the workshop.

All authors are asked to provide an improved version of the paper based on
the input from the work group discussions. These final versions will be
published in a book that documents the outcomes of the workshop.

Important Dates

Aug 31th 2012 – paper submission
Sep 14th 2012 – acceptance notification, registration opens
Oct 15th 2012 – registration ends
Nov 8-9 2012  – workshop days

More information can be found on the website www.educationalpatterns.org