Missing weeks ...

Having written a long blog last time, I have overcompensated and failed to write for a couple of weeks. More worryingly no one seems to have noticed - no comments on the previous posts, no irate emails from the students who have missed classes: perhaps they have all been busy with finishing their projects.

So what have I missed talking about? Well writing patterns and patterns for change. Management patterns never happened for two reasons (i) the book I discovered before the unit began on management patterns turned out to be more or less proto-patterns and while very interesting would not have helped much as a good example of patterns and their use (ii) I missed last week's class as well as the students because of a family emergency (4 year old with climbing temperature and what turned out to be a massive ear infection).

So what about writing patterns? Well amongst other things we looked at sections of Richard Gabriel's book "Writers' Workshops and the Work of Making Things". This covers how writers' workshops are run both for patterns and poetry. Everyone then had a go at writing a pattern on a topic they were familiar with and we used a draft pattern of mine to run a pattern writers' workshop.

The following week we looked at patterns for change using Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns book " Fearless Change: patterns for introducing new ideas". We then looked at a real life case-study where change was occuring and considered which patterns would help.