From finkx082 at umn.edu Wed Oct 21 09:18:03 2015 From: finkx082 at umn.edu (Alexander Fink) Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2015 11:18:03 -0500 Subject: [Pattern-language] Patterns for Social Work Message-ID: Hi all, My first time posting to the listserv, so I hope I'm following proper protocol here... TLDR; met Doug, excited about pattern languages, want to use them to open up thinking about possible practices in social work / youth work, could use your thinking, ideas, and experiences. thank you! Full version: I met Doug in Limerick this summer and was really excited to be introduced to the pattern languages work he's done. I was especially enthusiastic about the pattern language cards. I'm a youth worker and social worker and most of the work I do involves community organizing with young people. I often find it challenging to communicate about this work in a professional context that speaks in terms of evidence-based practice, randomized clinical trials, and "gold standard" research. My work adopts a critical angle, challenging structural injustice. Not only do the models talked about in my professional context not work to accomplish the purposes I orient toward, the methodologies used to research their "evidence" often play into colonialist and racist anti-patterns that I believe typically do much more harm than good. My professional context has several databases of so-called best practices like the Cochrane Collaborative and the Campbell Collaboration . These are touted to represent the best of my profession's knowledge about practice. Unfortunately, though the profession claims to include the kind of work I do, this work doesn't show up anywhere in their register of "best practice". Several years ago a colleague challenged me to create a similar database for the kind of work that I do. I responded that, though an interesting challenge, it would have to look very different than a "database" - that's not how knowledge works for our kind of practice. Hence my excitement about the pattern languages cards - to me, they represent the beginning of the kind of database for critical social work / youth work practice that I'd like to see. Rather than prescriptive, they are descriptive. Rather than close down other possibilities, they open up conversation and possibility for further thinking, collaboration, and study. Rather than elevate a particular kind of knowledge over all others, they offer up multiple ways of knowing and engaging. I proposed to Doug that I'd like to explore the patterns with some of my colleagues that practice social work / youth work similarly to myself. I'm curious if anyone has any reflections on this, or experiences they could share. Thank you! Alex Alex Fink alexfink.com [image: Alex Fink on about.me] Research Fellow Youth Studies, School of Social Work University of Minnesota 85 Peters Hall 1404 Gortner Avenue Saint Paul, MN 55108 Cell: 612-720-5549 finkx082 at umn.edu Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people. - Charles Paine, 1995 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From douglas at publicsphereproject.org Tue Oct 27 11:18:33 2015 From: douglas at publicsphereproject.org (Doug Schuler) Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 11:18:33 -0700 Subject: [Pattern-language] hacker spaces Message-ID: This looks pretty interesting.... https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Design_Patterns Douglas Schuler douglas at publicsphereproject.org Twitter: @doug_schuler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Public Sphere Project http://www.publicsphereproject.org/ Mailing list ~ Collective Intelligence for the Common Good http://scn9.scn.org/mailman/listinfo/ci4cg-announce Creating the World Citizen Parliament http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2013/creating-the-world-citizen-parliament Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (project) http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/lv Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (book) http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11601 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From douglas at publicsphereproject.org Tue Oct 27 11:22:21 2015 From: douglas at publicsphereproject.org (Doug Schuler) Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 11:22:21 -0700 Subject: [Pattern-language] anti patterns too! Message-ID: I just noticed that they interspersed a few anti-patterns among their patterns... https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Design_Patterns Douglas Schuler douglas at publicsphereproject.org Twitter: @doug_schuler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Public Sphere Project http://www.publicsphereproject.org/ Mailing list ~ Collective Intelligence for the Common Good http://scn9.scn.org/mailman/listinfo/ci4cg-announce Creating the World Citizen Parliament http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2013/creating-the-world-citizen-parliament Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (project) http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/lv Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (book) http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11601 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: