Had a great lunch today with Michael Berman in Portland, and boy am I glad I got down there. We talked about my recent fascination with the idea of Learning Design Patterns, and more broadly with agile methods in learning design. I mentioned that one thing that was a struggle was getting the pattern at the right level. The trick with patterns is they must be concrete enough that you can “think with them” but broad enough that they can generate unexpected solutions.
Michael, who worked a bit with design patterns in the 1990s, came up with a pattern that I think is at just the right level. He called it something along the lines of “Doing it Wrong”, pulling together the Trolling exercises of ds106, the public speaking exercises where you ask students to give a poor speech (e.g. mumble, use horrible powerpoint slides, don’t make eye contact, give a series of points that don’t relate), and the stats exercises I used to do where I told students to create a “biased data visualization” through using weird cut points, truncated Y-axes, strange groupings (lumping together people “shot OR killed”), and uncontrolled data.
At the moment, I think this is just the right level for a learning design pattern. There’s some underlying cognitive logic here about how we deconstruct experience. There’s an ability to match the pattern with higher order patterns about course design (what we might call the “edges”) and lower order patterns on the level of a single class session. It’s bigger and more generative than an Assignment Bank assignment, but smaller than a methodological category.
You might also have a design called “Formal Commitment”, where you push students to commit to an answer before discussion. You see this in a number of places such as Peer Instruction and some exercises from Brookfield’s Structured Discussion. There’s a lot of evidence that students need to commit to a Theory of the Moment, even if it is only temporarily, so that they can more rigorously explore a question. Students who don’t internalize a theory or prediction can’t see when that theory fails. This pattern might plug into some higher order patterns about targeting preconceptions or some lower order ones about Role Play.
Why does talking in this way matter? Because there’s something really special about well-delineated ideas expressed at that level. If they truly plug into something fundamental about cognition, we can learn things about this group of assignments as a class. What are some issues around the set-up of “You’re doing it wrong” assignments? What are some challenges of assessment?
If it’s a particularly good pattern, we’d also learn how it relates to certain environments — in learning design cases that environment might be a discipline, or the particular talents of your students.
Most importantly it’s at that crucial generative level. When we think in terms of activities, it’s too easy to get lost in the detail and lose track of what we are trying to accomplish. Theory, on the other hand, understands the point, but is too abstract to lead directly towards solutions. Patterns represent a sort embedded theory that provides the coherence and rigor of the theoretical while generating the warmth and resonance of the particular.
The larger goal is to create a middle ground between the deadness of current Big Design approaches to instructional design and the anarchy of ignoring design altogether. Because Big Design gives you this:
And design anarchy gives you this:
And what you really want is this:
Not to say a church and gazebo, mind you. But you’re looking a three centuries of architecture above in the Keene square, built by dozens of different people with no sense of urban theory and, for the most part, no architecture training. And yet it looks organic, it feels whole, like a single piece, and it functions better than most anything you’ll find anywhere. Why? Because the patterns of the New England town were internalized in such a way that you could build with the coherence of theory and predictibility of large-scale process without having to use theory or large-scale process.
I don’t know if design patterns is what gets us to this in learning design. I don’t know if you could ever reliably produce an education that works as well or feels as human as the New England town square. But it at least gets us away from the “10 tips for teaching” nonsense while avoiding theory. So let’s give it a go, right?
Hapgood 
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