Patterns for Complex Learning

Design pat­terns and pat­tern lan­guage are a smart way to rep­re­sent the analy­sis and solu­tion of a prob­lem in a way that is sen­si­tive to con­text, and informed by the­ory and evidence.

Last year with the sup­port of my advi­sor, Terry Ander­son, I spent a semes­ter explor­ing the ways in which infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies sup­port life­long learn­ing. I stum­bled across two quite remark­able works that gave the inde­pen­dent study course its form: Philip Candy’s com­pre­hen­sive 2004 report for the Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion, Sci­ence and Train­ing called Link­ing Think­ing: Self-Directed Learn­ing in the Dig­i­tal Age, and the Euro­pean Commission’s E-LEN project, which used design pat­terns as a way to col­lect best prac­tices to estab­lish a net­work of e-learning cen­tres. Jux­ta­pos­ing life­long learn­ing, infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies, Candy’s Online Learn­ing model and a method for cre­at­ing design pat­terns, we came up with the won­der­ful col­lec­tion of life­long learn­ing design pat­terns rep­re­sented in the pat­tern map below. With the news that our paper has been accepted for pub­li­ca­tion, with minor revi­sions, I thought it would be use­ful to col­lect all this infor­ma­tion in one place before I tackle said revisions.

What are Design Patterns?

Design pat­terns orig­i­nate in the work of the archi­tect Christo­pher Alexan­der. Soft­ware engi­neers have enthu­si­as­ti­cally adopted them in their prac­tice, and now other fields, such as edu­ca­tional design, are also show­ing inter­est. Alexander’s def­i­n­i­tion of a pat­tern is that it:

…
describes a prob­lem which occurs over and over again in our envi­ron­ment, and then describes the core of the solu­tion to that prob­lem, in such a way that you can use this solu­tion a mil­lion times over, with­out ever doing it the same way twice.

Pat­terns offer a way to inte­grate both both the analy­sis and solu­tion of a prob­lem, in a way that is sen­si­tive to con­text and informed by the­ory and evi­dence. Their value is that they sug­gest, rather than pre­scribe, a solu­tion. Solu­tions are inten­tion­ally incom­plete: they offer guid­ance but require embell­ish­ment. This makes them decep­tively dif­fi­cult to write and, frankly, require a good deal of effort to use.

The Pat­terns

You can nav­i­gate the pat­terns from the pat­tern map (rec­om­mended) or directly from the pat­tern links that fol­low. All of these pat­terns were first pub­lished on The Com­mon Loon, the weblog I used to sup­port the inde­pen­dent study course. These pat­terns are designed for life­long learn­ers (not pro­fes­sional design­ers or edu­ca­tors) and are rep­re­sented in the form cre­ated by Joseph Bergin and his col­leagues on the Ped­a­gog­i­cal Pat­terns project.

Links to pat­terns: Be a designer | Check for qual­ity | Choose the well-marked trail | Extend your reach | Extract it! | Go berryp­ick­ing | Mark your own trail | Tag it! | Tri­an­gu­late | Trust a sec­ondary source