Call for Papers
Patterns: Thinking about new opportunities for pedagogy
International workshop on educational patterns
8./9. November 2012 Danube University Krems/Austria

Motivation
Many pedagogical patterns are documented and there are case studies describing their successful application. However, there are still some open questions which might be the reason why these patterns did not get the broad attention they deserve.
The main goal of the workshop is to gain a deeper and more grounded understanding of the applicability of the ideas of Christopher Alexander in the field of education.
In his latest work Christopher Alexander describes 15 fundamental properties that make structures more alive and whole. These properties are already described for being applicable in many different domains including education. However, many of these applications seem to be highly speculative and therefore not reliable.

Topics
The workshop addresses three main topics.

Topic 1: The meaning of Christopher Alexander's 15 properties for education.
This topic aims at examining the meaning of the 15 properties described by Alexander in The Nature of Order for educational purposes with the focus on one property or a small subset of them. It is hereby important to make this applicability more specific and well-grounded in order to show that indeed the properties are – or are not – applicable. Possible questions to be addressed are:
- Can specific properties be used for designing educational actions and how can this applicability be supported?
- What do the properties mean in the field of education?
- Can we find examples of the properties in successful educational scenarios?
- Does this application still match with the original ideas of Alexander?

Topic 2: The specific volatile structures of educational situations.
A characteristic of patterns in the domain of education is their volatility, because the structures of a pattern instance which evolve based on social interactions are flexible and short-living. It is therefore difficult to document or measure them in a consistent way. Furthermore, the context of educational situations, ranging from short interactions to curriculum design, is always different, which makes the application of patterns less predictable. Possible questions to be addressed are:
- How can educational patterns be documented in a way which takes their volatility into account?
- What consequences does the volatility has for the conscious application of educational patterns?
- Can we generalize these volatile structures in the pattern format at all?

Topic 3: The empirical ground for educational patterns.
Educational situations are generally hard to generalize. Much empirical research in education are case studies which contain (too) many details and are therefore hard to generalize with respect to different educational situations. Other studies mainly contain general pedagogical principles and offer not much help in concrete situations. Patterns can connect these two views, but there still are open questions such as:
- How can educational patterns be empirically justified?
- Which pattern mining methods are appropriate for research in this field?
- As educational situations are highly dependent on their context, how can they be reliably generalized?

Submissions
We call for high-quality and innovative submissions, which address one or multiple of the above described topics and already are in a mature state. These submissions form the basis for deeper discussions in smaller work groups whereby the authors are expected to present their ideas in a short presentation.
Submissions can be made via e-mail to workshop@educationalpatterns.org. At least one of the authors of accepted papers is required to participate at the workshop.
All authors are asked to provide an improved version of the paper based on the input from the work group discussions. These final versions will be published in a book that documents the outcomes of the workshop.

Important Dates
Aug 31st 2012 – paper submission
Sep 15th 2012 – acceptance notification, registration opens
Oct 15th 2012 – registration ends
Nov 8-9 2012 – workshop days
More information can be found on the website www.educationalpatterns.org