Learners as designers...a note on pattern function

Patterns try to capture expert practice. Pedagogical patterns capture the expert practice of educators. Joseph Bergin and his collegues at the Pedagogical Patterns Project keep a wonderfully rich collection of pedagogical patterns and pattern language (they are now on book # 5).  I find their compact, repetitive, highly interconnected form very....well, the word hypnotic comes to mind. If there were a musical equivalent, it would be polynesian drums. Significantly, most of the patterns I've discovered come from the programming community who have really taken to patterns as a way to improve software design (see Software Pattern Design Library), and of which Bergin and colleagues are a part.

I have also discovered pedagogical patterns at the E-LEN project (see E-learning Design Patterns Repository), which even includes a collection of lifelong learning patterns. A particluarly interesting pattern is Ellen Rusman's Support choices by providing feedback on collaborative behaviour, which suggests that the collective behaviour of a network of learners can serve as a navigational aid for individual learners making decisions about learning paths and strategies. She gives it a one-star rating, which means that it is a tentative rather than mature pattern. This pattern targets designers of learning networks.

In contrast, the patterns I am working on target the lifelong learners themselves - not  designers and educators per se, although they would find them of value. It felt more natural to do this, and so I went hunting for reasons why this might be the case. I came up with two reasons.

The first is the way in which people have chosen to use the Web reflects the way they most naturally, most comfortably, most appropriately want to learn. "They've really made it their own," as Philip Candy writes of self-directed learners in his 2004 report for the Australian government, and many of the Pew Internet reports support this. Worse, most teachers and trainers for a whole bunch of good reasons typically use the new digital technologies under the old  familiar rubric of "transmit and assess." In other words, learners, not educators are the experts in lifelong learning.

The second reason is the growing realization that learners belong in a design space. Oh yes, we've always looked for learner input. As a trainer, I've include learner needs in training analysis, and handed out my fair share of "smilesheets" (i.e., Kirkpatrick's level one evaluations that asks participants what they liked/did not like in the training session). But partnership is a different kind of relationship than feedback. I've never quite looked at learners contribution to the design space quite the same way since reading Gerhard Fischer's Beyond Couch Potatoes. He argues that consumers give feedback; designers make active contributions. in personally meaningful activities, anyone who wants to be a designer should be able to be a designer:

Many computer users and designers today are domain professionals, competent practitioners, and discretionary users and should not be considered naïve users, or dummies (despite the infinite number of books entitled "X for Dummies"). They worry about tasks, they are motivated to contribute and to create good products, they care about personal growth, and they want to have convivial tools that make them independent of "high-tech scribes" (whose role is defined by the fact that the world of computing is still too much separated into a population of elite scribes who can act as designers and a much larger population of intellectually disenfranchised computer phobes who are forced into a consumer role). The experience of having participated in the framing and solving of a problem or in the creation of an artifact (see Figure 1) makes a difference to those who are affected by the solution and therefore consider it personally meaningful and important: "People are more likely to like a solution if they have been involved in its generation; even though it might not make sense otherwise" (Rittel, 1984).

If learners are designers, then they too need patterns to make the best practices explicit.

 

posted by: Shanta at 09:33 | link | comments
design, resources, lifelong, learning, patterns