Designing and using group software through patterns

Our Agenda
Who am I?
Demo of island.byu.edu
Design principles of island.byu.edu
Problems of designing / using group software
Why patterns rock.

Who am I?
Soon-to-graduate student in the Masters of Information Systems Management degree @ BYU
Entrepreneur, founder of Edully – Social Learning Platform provider
Passion is helping organizations work and learn – together and better.
Blog = http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog
Twitter = http://twitter.com/kylemathews

Edully Design Goals
Move control and responsibility for learning to the learners.
Provide collaborative learning tools to classrooms and other formal learning communities
Serve as scaffolding for growing a diverse ecology of informal learning communities.
Facilitate conversations (not content delivery)

Demo
Create discussion (through web + email)
Create group
Join group / leave group
Create image gallery

Edully Design Goals
Move control and responsibility for learning to the learners.
Provide collaborative learning tools to classrooms and other formal learning communities
Serve as scaffolding for growing a diverse ecology of informal learning communities.
Facilitate conversations (not content delivery)

Learning Ecologies
Ecology as an open system, dynamic and interdependent, diverse, partially self organizing, adaptive, and fragile. This concept is then extended to include the following characteristics of a learning ecology:
A collection of overlapping communities of interest
Cross pollinating with each other
Constantly evolving
Largely self organizing
See https://island.byu.edu/group/information-systems 30% of group members are alumni

Micro-labs
” These highly networked micro labs [are] focused on topics of deep inquiry... A team of participants with the necessary skills might be distributed among several institutions, several countries, networked digitally and through ongoing academic relationships...Because they are networked, a single micro-lab’s reach extends beyond the team itself or the duration of a specific project. When the opportunity arises, these micro-labs can coalesce into one larger lab with tremendous diversity and richness of talent. Breaking apart again, they may redistribute talent and resources. Analogous to the way 'process networks' mobilize highly specialized small companies across an extended integrated design and manufacturing process, a network of micro-labs creates a horizontal rhizomic structure in which the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. The networked micro-lab can adapt to new questions and opportunities from outside as well as inside the network. ”
– Pendleton-Jullian, A. (2009). Design Education and Innovation Ecotones

Designing Social Software
A tricky problem

Who are we optimizing for?
Conflict between needs of group + individual
”Optimizing the outcome for a subsystem will in general not optimize the outcome for the system as a whole.” http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/suboptim.html
Tragedy of the commons

Groups > individuals
”Richard Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education...was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups...were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.”
– ” Minds on Fire” John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler

Group software
Shift from designing for human-computer interactions to designing human-computer-human interactions
”Most of the important work in social software has been technically simple but socially complex”
– Clay Shirky ”Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software”

Back to learning

The problem
Of Designing an effective learning classroom.
Teachers (generally speaking) don't fully understand problem of teaching.
This problem is made worse by introducing social media into the classroom.

Understanding problems hard
”Today functional problems are becoming less simple all the time. But designers rarely confess their ability to solve them. Instead, when a designer does not understand a problem clearly enough to find the order it really calls for, he falls back on some arbitrarily chosen formal order. The problem, because of its complexity, remains unsolved.
– Christopher Alexander, ”Notes on the Synthesis of Form”

Combating complexity
. . . with patterns

Understanding the problem
Patterns bridge gap between context, problem, and solution in easily understood way.
Common solutions for common problems
Catalog best practices from best teachers

Share our knowledge
I write patterns for sub-problems I understand
You can write patterns for sub-problems you understand
Then we can assemble patterns written by community and design much more effective learning enviornments for our students.

Resources
” Here Comes Everyone” by Clay Shirky http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536
” Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi Excellent intro to science of networks
Introduction to using patterns in web design – http://37signals.com/papers/introtopatterns/
” Designing for Social Traction” – http://bokardo.com/archives/designing-for-social-traction-slide-deck/
” Drupal for Education and E-Learning” by Bill Fitzgerald
” The Art of the Community” – upcoming book by Ubuntu community manager – http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/
” The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization” by Peter Senge
” The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization” by John Hagel and John Seely Brown
” Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0” by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume43/MindsonFireOpenEducationtheLon/162420
” Design Innovation and Innovation Ecotones” by Ann Pendleton-Jullian http://president.asu.edu/node/705
” Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems” – http://buildingreputation.com/
” Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges” by Andrew McAfee
Social software Patterns
” Designing Social Interfaces” – http://www.designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
” Community Design Patterns” – http://www.slideshare.net/pecus/online-communities-design-patterns-255635
” Social Software Pattern Language” – http://wikis.sun.com/display/ASSPL/A+Social+Software+Pattern+Language

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Designing and using group software through patterns

by kylemathews on Aug 13, 2009

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