[peeragogy-handbook] Patterns

[Joe Corneli]

"PEERAGOGY, AT ITS CORE, COMES TO LIFE IN APPLIED PRACTICE"

... I feel like this should maybe introduce some activities?
Furthermore, maybe when we devise these activities we should have in
mind — not puzzles or recipes — but rather artistic exercises.

Psychogeography and chaos magic (e.g., in the sense of Grant Morrison’s
"Pop Magic!" essay) come to mind.  Consider Howard Rheingold’s
’Pataphysical Slot Machine as an example.

PATTERN-ANALOGUES

Stephan mentioned:

 « Engelbart with his ABC model, Polanyi for information encoding,
   zooming in and out from the general to the specific. »

PATTERNS THEMSELVES

Maybe a bit of work should be carried out to contextualise ‘patterns’ as
a pattern.  I made one example like that it “Patterns of Design”.
(Broadly we could consider reworking the contents of that paper to flesh
out our pattern catalogue; even though it’s multi-author, I did most of
the writing so I think we’d be in the clear to adapt it.)

IN RELATIONSHIP TO SOFTWARE PATTERNS

Stephan points out these are pretty different domains.  Talking about
software might actually reduce the clarity of our presentation
(especially if we’re sloppy in our presentation).

IN RELATIONSHIP TO WIKI

We should probably reference Ward Cunningham’s "Wiki as Pattern
Language" paper.

IN RELATIONSHIP TO “SEMANTIC BOOTSTRAPPING”

Stephan commented:

  « Ward uses it now at least for data patterns and electronics projects
    + sensory, but because it's on the web, it means it's
    server-centric/-dependent, pattern interpreters (DSL parsers), even
    despite being used via a plugin system, with the web GUI etc. being
    vertically integrated, I/we can't use it as a semantic source exept
    if we do it entirely our own way, in which case we could do it
    entirely our own way anyway with or without the Federated Wiki. »

Now, in 2021, we’re starting to do just that, with a marked up
collection of PARs and patterns, a little bit of playing around with
what we can do with this in both the web format and Emacs (as well as
‘in practice’ within meetings).

Writing about this requires jumping on the train while it’s moving, but
that’s fine: the idea is for both the software practices and the
patterns to help us manage our work in the project.  Much more can be
said about these things, but much of it is too technical for a first
chapter.

“WHAT’S NEXT”

Continuing the theme above:

Stephan:

  « if the patterns were implemented in software or a template workbook,
    after the reader has chosen the pattern and reflected on its
    description, a "What's Next" step would be filled in (and maybe
    progress tracked, too), to be cleared again after completion to take
    the next new step. »

Again, we’re getting closer to being able to use the patterns in
connection with the PARs to manage the ongoing work in the project, so
we can see how ideas like this work in practice.

ANTIPATTERNS

This seems like unnecessary terminology.  Maybe we can check usefulness
of concepts by creating a Glossary and checking whether we actually use
the concepts that we mention in multiple places.  If we don’t I can’t
see them as very useful.

PROOFREADING

Someone should run the MS through a grammar checker at some stage before
we go to print next time.

CHECK LIVENESS OF LINKS

Similarly, someone should run the MS through wget or similar to make
sure all the links are live.

CURATED VIDEO FEED

C/o Stephan: Here’s a video ‘Christopher Alexander - Patterns in
Architecture’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA

This makes me think that we might want to add a “Recommended Viewing”
section along with the “Recommended Reading” section.

PATTERNS OF DESIGN

NOTES NOV. 5, 2019

In a federated wiki, you can fork and iterate. It makes peer authoring
situations easy to follow along.  You can, within Federated Wiki, change
the context — look at your own wiki, or bring in context from other
authors.  Most patterns are named, so if you shift your context to
include other authors, you’ll see when other people have written
something new about the pattern that you are thinking about editing.  I
like their most recent edit, and I think I’ll copy that.

“Deep relationships between wikis and pattern languages” - Ward
Cunningham, cf “Wiki as Pattern Language”, 2013 PLoP conference.

Charles: I took quite a deep dive into pattern languages at the time
when I was looking at DAOs and that possibility space. I intuited that
like there’s an intrinsic connection with wikis and pattern languages; I
feel DAOs also similarly plug in.

Comparing the Wikipedia article: there’s a template, a title, a
subtitle, a context, the forces, the problem, the solution, the
rationale, the resolution, and what’s next. And soon we will have
concrete examples!

The fun thing about the Wikipedia entry is that they give a childish
example of ChocolateChipRatio.  Determine the optimum ratio of chocolate
chips to cookie dough? Observe that most people think chocolate is the
best part, but too much chocolate will prevent the chocolate from
holding together.

Maybe we should have in the pattern introduction already a concrete
example — maybe not cookies, but something else peeragogy related, to
make it even more tangible.

We haven’t done a pattern-based analysis of the case studies — that
would be an interesting exercise.  It’s a kind of a lens, and once you
look at things that way, you start to say “what is the pattern here?” —
this is abstract but it can help you to be more creative, and help you
look at the world in a new way.

Maybe the word pattern should be mentioned in the book (e.g., to apply
the pattern thinking throughout the handbook).

What about a card deck, that could just be a variation or a
distillation?


-- 
Dr Joseph A. Corneli (https://github.com/holtzermann17)

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