Organizing a Pattern Catalog

[skreutzer]

There are many pattern catalogs. Consider Christopher Alexander's for architecture in book form, Ward Cunningham's way more flexible one about programming in wiki form, Wise Democracy's (Tom Atlee) in carton card and web form (with comments/discussion below them), John Kellden's in text (and another variant that's potentially a card game), and in the last session of the reading group we learned about Group Works (print, website and app) for the facilitation of a meeting, where also this list is maintained: https://groupworksdeck.org/other-pattern-language-links

I'm not entirely sure how patterns are necessarily related to peeragogy except for how the project got influenced historically, but it makes sense to offer students and teachers some best practice patterns and an entire pattern language behind it which expresses how peeragogy can be applied, and especially the pedagogical aspects translated into a peer context/environment, as they don't exclusively affect trained teachers any more, but students just as much too (basically both switching between these two roles depending on the circumstances), therefore a shared pedagogical language of patterns is needed for participants to know what's going on and to develop + make use of certain behaviors/approaches that are beneficial for peer learning and avoid the friction of traditional formal teaching.

The handbook in its current (v3) form seems to work as an invitation/introduction to peeragogy theory (and of course is a result of peeragogy practice), but for the patterns as found/distributed in the handbook becoming more practically useful, did you notice that it's kind of difficult to find the patterns in the book? Sure, there's the table of content, but that makes it a two-step lookup. If the pattern catalog were at the end (appendix or not), one could easily just jump into it and navigate back and forth to browse the patterns without the need to consult the table of contents first. Pattern being tools for work collected in catalogs for lookup, I think the idea is to print a standalone catalog as well and maybe too do the card thing, or even way better, glossary augmentation and implementations in software, to make it a zero-step "lookup" where the pattern is right where it's needed or where it can be applied. In a learning environment, participants might want to pull the "A specific project" pattern to suggest/request/signal that they want more focus, with which other peers may agree or push the button of another pattern they want to apply, or not adhering at all, or describing a new pattern they want to use in such a situation that may go straight into the pattern catalog (of the group or global), where it may remain or not, but software should help with organizing all of these activities and make them easy + cheap.

For review or extension of the patterns, I think the After Action Review could be a good source for informing the design of the patterns and the pattern language, where actual peer learning activities get analyzed to mine the healthy, nurturing practices from those, ideally supported by software as well that helps with the organization of the reviews and an ongoing review practice.

[Joe Corneli]

On Sun, 22 Dec 2019 at 13:14, 'skreutzer' via Peeragogy <peer...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

There are many pattern catalogs. Consider Christopher Alexander's for architecture in book form, Ward Cunningham's way more flexible one about programming in wiki form, Wise Democracy's (Tom Atlee) in carton card and web form (with comments/discussion below them), John Kellden's in text (and another variant that's potentially a card game), and in the last session of the reading group we learned about Group Works (print, website and app) for the facilitation of a meeting, where also this list is maintained: https://groupworksdeck.org/other-pattern-language-links

^ Something like this paragraph could go into the Handbook to help explain what patterns are, and to give the reader some additional options.  If I remember correctly one of the EuroPLoP papers is about maintaining a repository of patterns, so we could also point to that.  A couple other relevant examples are mentioned in the "Patterns of Peeragogy" paper: Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution and Pedagogical Patterns: Advice for Educators.

 

I'm not entirely sure how patterns are necessarily related to peeragogy except for how the project got influenced historically

Iteration 1 was: "oh that's cool, let's see if we can use it" (circa 2012)

Iteration 2 was: "ah, ok, now we understand what patterns actually are... let's try to do this right" (circa 2013)

Iteration 3 was: "We can do something novel here with 'Next Steps' to shape the evolution of a collaborative project" (circa 2014)

Iteration 4 is basically still in progress:  We're going to try to "patternize" as much of the Handbook as we can. Also trying to get our 'Next Steps' are clearly sorted and aligned with patterns. 

 

but it makes sense to offer students and teachers some best practice patterns and an entire pattern language behind it which expresses how peeragogy can be applied, and especially the pedagogical aspects translated into a peer context/environment,

This could be an interesting thing to try -- collating the relevant patterns and talking about how they can be used/adapted/adjusted within peeragogy.  This could be an interesting contribution to one of the PLoP conferences (possibly building on your critique of Ward's paper about Wiki as Pattern language...?).

 

did you notice that it's kind of difficult to find the patterns in the book?

I think the plan with the more fully "Patternized" book is to make the whole thing a pattern catalogue, furthermore organised from the top down as one giant pattern with sub-patterns.  This should make it easier!

Agree that multiple presentations are good too, and that software can help!  Hooking patterns up with issue trackers (next steps) should be something we can 'export' from this project as a methodology that many others can use.

 

For review or extension of the patterns, I think the After Action Review could be a good source for informing the design of the patterns and the pattern language, where actual peer learning activities get analyzed to mine the healthy, nurturing practices from those, ideally supported by software as well that helps with the organization of the reviews and an ongoing review practice.

Yes, 100%. It's a way to detect new patterns, and  debug existing ones.

[skreutzer]

Update: Charles Blass was the one who mentioned Group Decks and linked their pattern deck as well as their list of other pattern languages. In general, wouldn't one expect that there's a place that collects all these pattern languages (if libre-freely licensed, otherwise sharing them and doing useful things with them would be a problem) in a standardized format as a data project, so then tools can be developed that generate printed editions, carton cards, games, interaction environments, while also organizing their development and maintenance?

[Joe Corneli]

I found the title of the paper I thought of before, it's relevant to your query: "Towards a Community-Centric Pattern Repository". 

If you click through on that title from here, you'll get a copy:

http://www.fullerton.edu/ecs/faculty/pinventado/publications/

They also made a one-page workshop summary:

https://europlop.net/sites/default/files/files/FG17-Towards%20a%20Community-centric%20Pattern%20Repository-1.pdf

 

Unfortunately, 'libre' seems to be extremely rare within pattern language world. I'm not sure if the specific repository described in that paper is online.

We have reasonably good contacts with the organisers of PLoP and EuroPLoP, who we might be able to work with to sort something out in this regard going forward, but there is a lot of momentum behind their existing non- libre way of doing things.  Some other folks like Helene Finidori may have tangled with this problem in the past and made some progress? (CC'd)

[Charles Blass]

stephan:
“wouldn't one expect that there's a place that collects all these pattern languages (if libre-freely licensed, otherwise sharing them and doing useful things with them would be a problem) in a standardized format as a data project, so then tools can be developed that generate printed editions, carton cards, games, interaction environments, while also organizing their development and maintenance?”

something i’ve thought about increasingly;
perhaps we can map out steps towards achieving this.

i think joachim stroh at diglife has been developing something with digital cards....might be a partial solution. need to have a look there

[skreutzer]

Iteration 3 was: "We can do something novel here with 'Next Steps' to shape the evolution of a collaborative project" (circa 2014)

Iteration 4 is basically still in progress:  We're going to try to "patternize" as much of the Handbook as we can. Also trying to get our 'Next Steps' are clearly sorted and aligned with patterns. 

Here's what I don't understand: if the patterns are a way to bootstrap a peeragogical practice of, for example, ongoing peer learning courses, and even the handbook gets patternized for that purpose/reason, why is the focus on the handbook and producing a new printed version as a fixed snapshot of the theoretical expression, while the next steps, activity/progress tracking, all of the other useful components for project collaboration and its data remain with little attention? We're not planning to print outdated "next steps" of the peeragogy project (except as examples) with a 1+ year paper book release cycle, are we? What would that mean for the cycle of tasks/activities (very slow and long ones, maybe only capturing larger projects?), or the relevancy of the printed handbook (what if work got completed with the paper snapshot on the shelf not updating, and would the expectation be that new versions duplicate all the more static pattern descriptions and only the next steps change, at which point there could be a journal of next steps printed separately but augmented by a pattern companion?)?
 

I think the plan with the more fully "Patternized" book is to make the whole thing a pattern catalogue, furthermore organised from the top down as one giant pattern with sub-patterns.  This should make it easier!

I see, helps with my question above as well, but then, what to do about all the theory chapters? Get rid of them, move them into a separate publication, force-fit them into the pattern template somehow?
 

Hooking patterns up with issue trackers (next steps) should be something we can 'export' from this project as a methodology that many others can use.

Makes the patterns operatable, a mechanism to actually realize the repeated effects they're describing. I always wonder who needs patterns for what, if in a "soft"/vague domain, where patterns still can be used as a tool of passive analysis, but if there's no way to actively design or deliberately pick nurturing patterns and in some way actively applying them, they'll remain nice thoughts and theory, not necessarily solving the problems they're supposed to solve.
 

For review or extension of the patterns, I think the After Action Review could be a good source for informing the design of the patterns and the pattern language, where actual peer learning activities get analyzed to mine the healthy, nurturing practices from those, ideally supported by software as well that helps with the organization of the reviews and an ongoing review practice.

Yes, 100%. It's a way to detect new patterns, and  debug existing ones.

Same for the After Action Review (AAR), shouldn't those be captured/recorded as data in a format somewhere, possibly with the help of software (or alternatively manually)? Which of the current activities could be AARed? The reading group? Handbook v4 activity (but that's not after the action yet)? The issues on GitHub (or better, the larger projects behind those)? Who is doing that where, when, how? Is it important that somebody else reviews the action (not the trainee), potentially an arbitrary/random group of anonymous peers?

[skreutzer]

Thanks for the link. If it's not libre-freely licensed, how would one legally be allowed to build and share such a repository, and encouraged to do technical work for it? That's probably why such a thing doesn't exist already, and can't in the future per your assessment, in the pattern world. What does it help if along with Ward Cunningham, the patterns aren't printed on static paper any more but flexible/adjustable in digital, if copyright prevents people from doing so? The material in Federated Wiki is on Creative Commons BY-SA per default for a reason, otherwise it couldn't legally work and would be a complete nightmare. Sure, one can always read about the pattern idea of some other author and potentially apply them, if that's all what pattern people want to do, having pattern authors and pattern users instead of a peer community that maintains their patterns together, that's just fine, I'm not going/investing to try to change that.

[skreutzer]

something i’ve thought about increasingly;
perhaps we can map out steps towards achieving this.

I thought about starting a little series/experimentation with the Peeragogy patterns as an example, but it seems to be utterly pointless, of little interest/want/need/use, and therefore costly because there's plenty of more urgent and important things to do. By now, what would be a pretty good rationale for who needs this for what? I don't necessarily need patterns myself, hardly teaching topics, hardly involved in peer learning classes, not being aware of learning opportunities that are offered (except the actual regular online peer learning that happens unorganized, unstructured, circumstantial all over the place).

i think joachim stroh at diglife has been developing something with digital cards....might be a partial solution. need to have a look there

I don't know...DigLife is doing their platform thing, and how could peers interact/interface/collaborate with that, without becoming a member (and loosing access/capabilities again if the membership does expire or is revoked)? Other than that, do they have some actual pattern practices/activities implemented in their platform by now? Not aware, don't know, it's a black box from the outside, likely intentionally so.

[Joe Corneli]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2019 at 14:10, 'skreutzer' via Peeragogy <peer...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

why is the focus on the handbook ... while the next steps, activity/progress tracking, all of the other useful components for project collaboration and its data remain with little attention?

The handbook is going to document a broad set of activities. It is a focus point insofar as it brings many things together.  Often these other things are the main focus for individual contributors. Speaking for myself, the two main things I have been working on recently are a course that will use the handbook as it’s main text, and another more computational project. Both have relevant deadlines on January 10th and I will share draft material before that.  

We're not planning to print outdated "next steps" of the peeragogy project (except as examples) with a 1+ year paper book release cycle, are we?

No, the next steps are meant to be current.

What would that mean for the cycle of tasks/activities (very slow and long ones, maybe only capturing larger projects?), or the relevancy of the printed handbook

The handbook represents everything we have learned in the time we have been working together. If we complete all of the next steps for a given pattern, it is less relevant and the protocol is to move it to a scrapbook.

I see, helps with my question above as well, but then, what to do about all the theory chapters? Get rid of them, move them into a separate publication, force-fit them into the pattern template somehow?

If they don’t fit easily we may still retain them if they are useful for some other purpose. For example, a given case study could be analysed in terms of the several patterns that are relevant to what is going on inside that case study. (Alexander presents some examples of complete designs that use many patterns; that’s similar.)

Makes the patterns operatable, a mechanism to actually realize the repeated effects they're describing. I always wonder who needs patterns for what, if in a "soft"/vague domain, where patterns still can be used as a tool of passive analysis, but if there's no way to actively design or deliberately pick nurturing patterns and in some way actively applying them, they'll remain nice thoughts and theory, not necessarily solving the problems they're supposed to solve.

The “Next Steps” facet will ensure that they are somewhat practical for our project. The same addition can be used by others too. My hope is that the pattern catalogue will grow so that it describes a lot of what goes on in peer production and peer learning projects. Ideally much of the material will also become computationally meaningful so that there will be actual working code that can do or assist with relevant tasks. This is a long term vision that shaded into serious work in AI, but the patterns will be useful for human designers and managers (working collaboratively) all throughout this process. 

Same for the After Action Review (AAR), shouldn't those be captured/recorded as data in a format somewhere, possibly with the help of software (or alternatively manually)?

Yes they should be recorded. Sometimes people don’t use the exact template but it is fairly easy to translate an informal assessment into the template. If people are explicit then things become easier.

Which of the current activities could be AARed? The reading group? Handbook v4 activity (but that's not after the action yet)? The issues on GitHub (or better, the larger projects behind those)? Who is doing that where, when, how?

 All of the above.  We invented the PAR so that reviews can take place in real time. 

Everyone is asked to contribute to this process. 

Is it important that somebody else reviews the action (not the trainee), potentially an arbitrary/random group of anonymous peers?

In the PAR it is done by the people involved, not by a third party.

[Joe Corneli]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2019 at 14:17, 'skreutzer' via Peeragogy <peer...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Thanks for the link. If it's not libre-freely licensed, how would one legally be allowed to build and share such a repository, and encouraged to do technical work for it?

Naturally it’s possible to reimplement the patterns if they are useful! Copyright only covers expression, not ideas. So, it would be possible to make a Grand Unified Pattern Catalog. I am not sure this would be useful but it’s at least something we could consider.

[Joe Corneli]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2019 at 14:31, 'skreutzer' via Peeragogy <peer...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

By now, what would be a pretty good rationale for who needs this for what? I don't necessarily need patterns myself, hardly teaching topics, hardly involved in peer learning classes, not being aware of learning opportunities that are offered (except the actual regular online peer learning that happens unorganized, unstructured, circumstantial all over the place).

There is an interesting argument by Peter Norvig that the classic object oriented design patterns are way less useful in Lisp because the language already implements the patterns without extra structure. Paul Graham riffs on this by saying that if you see ‘patterns’ (repetition) in your code you are doing something wrong, because you are missing relevant abstractions.

What does this mean in the context of peeragogy?  I think we need to look at the problems that we are trying to address. There are some big ones that don’t have standard solutions yet. We are trying to design a useful approach for EVERYONE to have access to high quality learning opportunities. We try to use these approaches ourselves too... and to share what works for us, and to keep learning.

“Patterns” give a convenient way to talk about these things. If specific patterns are no longer useful we don’t need to worry about them, so fold them away into the scrapbook.

We are still developing our workflow around these things, but that’s a sketch of how it looks to me at the moment!

[skreutzer]

Naturally it’s possible to reimplement the patterns if they are useful! Copyright only covers expression, not ideas.

That's true, but on the one hand might not socially be acceptable, working against/besides the original pattern designers and why work against their will/intentions, and on the other hand wastes valuable, scarce human lifetime capacity for re-inventing the same wheel for a stupid reason. Still do it? Sure, if it's an amazingly good or popular pattern or pattern language, many will adopt/copy/adapt it in many ways, so it's less of a concern, but would the pattern repository then likely not cover less popular niche pattern languages and tend to collect the more popular ones (which may or may not be a statement about their usefulness, that they work and are well designed, because popularity can spiral itself up, not giving well-designed pattern languages a chance, visibility that may indeed work well in a less popular niche domain).

[skreutzer]

We are trying to design a useful approach for EVERYONE to have access to high quality learning opportunities.

I'm not convinced yet... To me it became increasingly clear that the focus is actually on the pedagogical side and less on digital/peerness, and why not. All the peer learning that goes on every day on a massive scale on the Internet, peeragogy doesn't seem to necessarily address or be compatible with it. Words like "access" and "open" mean many different things to many different people, so even in the most poor country, theoretically the population always has access to high quality learning opportunities if they only manage to walk to the capital and maybe get school attendance funded, or here visiting a research library to potentially look something up or what not, or attend a physical university or joining real-time/presence video conference courses, pretty much like people did in ancient times already.

In contrast, when Edward Snowden was asked about the origin of his technical expertise, he said that he received a "deep informal education" which isn't taught by a single place or institution, not available in any structured or organized form, which explains why media/digital competency/literacy is so poor and also can't improve.

At the same time, peer learning could learn and benefit from getting better at teaching skills and pedagogy, but how would these two separate spaces potentially start to overlap/join? Digital is different in nature, so the rules and models from the physical world don't apply (and in reverse, digital rules don't apply in the physical space). Pedagogy obviously is very dominantly based on/in the physical space, without which a lot of digital peer learning is happening everywhere, all the time.

The SWATs case study chapter, for example, isn't about teaching technology (as students/learners already encounter in their everyday life and increasingly so in the future and in the workplace), it's not about the SWATs becoming teachers to their peer learners, it's about them helping the teacher to make use of technology to create materials or conduct the lesson, there's not even really peerness in there except between the teacher and SWATs, it's not even that the teacher eventually learns the tech from SWATs but them doing some assisting work for the teacher, none of which necessarily represents the realities of digital peer learning, but instead better fits the traditional academic peer concept. OK, I may potentially read too much into the description presented in the chapter, but I think it may still illustrate the general point.

With a mixed audience of teachers from a physical/formal context, digital/software/tech people (but less so), learners/students potentially (who already and soon encounter the realities outside of formal institutionalized schooling), the Peeragogy handbook and project inevitably run into questions of how these different perspectives could possibly resolve, but even if they don't, it's always helping some audiences in some ways, to at least have a discussion about these topics, better than continuing with business as usual in any case.

[skreutzer]

Want to add a little thing: if the subject matter isn't tech, but something else, in order to have some SWATs around, they probably better have been trained/educated somewhere so they can assist teachers in courses/lessons of other domains. There's a major and global shortage of tech capacities.

[Joe Corneli]

On Mon, 6 Jan 2020 at 11:59, 'skreutzer' via Peeragogy <peer...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

We are trying to design a useful approach for EVERYONE to have access to high quality learning opportunities.

I'm not convinced yet... To me it became increasingly clear that the focus is actually on the pedagogical side and less on digital/peerness, and why not.

With the existing Handbook content, I can totally see how one gets that impression. The way I see it personally, we are addressing the "knowledge economy" as a whole: pedagogy is just one facet. Topologically, it's part of the boundary, the part where people learn how to participate.  To put it another way, pedagogy is the on-ramp, but we're also concerned with what happens when people are actually up to speed!  The more central part is the productive and relational core.

Maybe you'd be interested in this essay from Lisa Snow McDonald, which is going to go into the Starter Pack:

https://authorlisasnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Understanding-Peeragogy-to-Maximize-Resources-and-Efficiencies.pdf

It looks at peeragogy from the perspective of on-the-job collaboration -- and is far from pedagogy in any typical sense.

All the peer learning that goes on every day on a massive scale on the Internet, peeragogy doesn't seem to necessarily address or be compatible with it.

I think peeragogy is trying to understand the patterns that apply across all of these experiences. If we're missing something or getting things wrong then we need to improve how we're working.

theoretically the population always has access to high quality learning opportunities if they only manage to walk to the capital and maybe get school attendance funded

Maybe, but in some cases people have to provide for their families, or they have been trafficked into slavery, or -- without any extreme edge cases needed, because everyone is familiar with these examples -- maybe they are just a bit lazy and prefer the easy and familiar patterns where they don't learn much.  That's very typical. 

Also, a lot of learning happens when we are asleep, so being a bit lazy from time to time can help solidify learning :-)

Here I like to recall the term 'paragogy', which translates to /production/.  For example, we can by default produce loads of CO2 and other waste products, but "productivity" is about more than just waste, and also about more than just replication of the same.  New species are made over very long time spans for example.  Paragogy is useful for addressing the need for more rapid change outlined by Peter Sloterdijk in this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_fsFwf0juk -- though he also talks about people living with slower rhythms as well.  Sloterdijk has a reputation for being a conservative thinker, though maybe it's more nuanced (https://becomingintegral.com/2017/04/17/is-sloterdijk-conservative/). Personally think I basically align with his views, as well as I understand them.

Anyway, the response of peeragogy is not simply to say "we need faster and faster production cycles", but rather to be careful and understand what is actually produced along the way, including waste, human suffering, and all.

it's not even that the teacher eventually learns the tech from SWATs but them doing some assisting work for the teacher, none of which necessarily represents the realities of digital peer learning, but instead better fits the traditional academic peer concept. OK, I may potentially read too much into the description presented in the chapter, but I think it may still illustrate the general point.

I think that's a fair characterisation of that case study. The recent proposal about "peeragogical pathways" looks at peeragogy in free/open software development -- a rather different setting from the SWATs example. I suppose the hope is to have a "modular" understanding (using design patterns) that would allow us to discuss all of these different examples coherently.  Then, later, we can even revisit the SWATs, in that classroom setting or somewhere else, and say something like "Hey, we have some interesting designs for 'SWATs 2.0' -- learning from experiences with open software, etc., so we can introduce some rather different ways of organising teaching on this basis."

With a mixed audience of teachers from a physical/formal context, digital/software/tech people (but less so), learners/students potentially (who already and soon encounter the realities outside of formal institutionalized schooling), the Peeragogy handbook and project inevitably run into questions of how these different perspectives could possibly resolve, but even if they don't, it's always helping some audiences in some ways, to at least have a discussion about these topics, better than continuing with business as usual in any case.

Certainly!  Also the situations of "conflict" are potentially good circumstances to try some design work.