Christian Kohls mines for patterns in London (Oct. 28th, 5pm)

(cross-posted from designforlearning)
A bit of a short notice, I know. But if you happen to be in town, come to Christian Kohl’s talk at the Knowledge lab:

Getting to sound educational settings, successful teaching methods and beneficial instructional tools and materials is a challenging design task. To not reinvent the wheel and learn by good practices that have proven in the past, patterns are a promising approach to capture the knowledge of experts. Design patterns describe the essential elements of solutions for recurrent problems and reason about context, applicability, benefits and liabilities. In this presentation, patterns of interactive information graphics will be demonstrated to show how various visual interaction forms can help or fail to serve in an instructional context. Based on these and other pedagogical patterns some fundamental concepts of patterns will be illustrated.

Starting with an elaboration of common practices of the pattern community to find, write and reflect about patterns, a model of pattern acquisition will be developed. This model is based on schema theory and leads to a discussion about the reliability and usability of patterns. The striking question is whether the documented patterns, the patterns in our mind and the patterns in the world are the same.

About the speaker
Christian Kohls is a Member of the research unit “Design and Implementation of Integrative Learning Environments”. He has been working at the Knowledge Media Research Center since 2005. His job is the technical development of the German information and qualification portal e-teaching.org. He is also responsible for editoring the content section “media technology” and gives frequently online trainings in e-learning software. After his studies of media and computer science he worked in the e-learning team of the University of Applied Sciences Wedel/Hamburg. He worked as consultant at pharus53 software solutions and implemented multilingual wbt solutions and software tutorials. He is inventor and development coordinator of moowinx, an end user tool to create interactive graphics.

e-learning patterns: workshop at KMRC, Tuebingen, March 4-6

Once you start its hard to stop, but really I should. After all, this is the Planet project site – not the pattern herald. Still, this workshop is organized by Christian, so it has to be worth the trip. Plus, you can catch a gig at Tuebingen’s epplehaus.

Design patterns capture proven solutions for recurrent problems. The goal is to externalize the implicit knowledge of an expert, using a highly structured description format for documentation. Patterns have been around for decades, they are a success story in the field of software design, and recently have become very popular to describe recurrent teaching scenarios, instructional methods and tools.

This workshop aims to 

Capture and document the state-of-the art – Establish quality standards – Dissemination – Ties to related fields – Co-operation

For more information about the workshop, please contact Christian Kohls.
Mail: c.kohls(at)iwm-kmrc.de