Here is the text of a speech that pattern language inventor Christopher Alexander gave in 1996 to The 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA). There is a lot –a lot– in this speech that makes it interesting and fulfilling reading (and entirely applicable to online learning and knowledge sharing). I’ll [...]
It took me a while to find it on my shelves, but I finally dug out Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community, which is a book on applying Christopher Alexander’s ideas to software engineering. For a good chunk of this book, you could take out words like “software,” “code,” and “objects,” and substitute [...]
I’m insanely jealous. It turns out that Jay Cross lives in a house built by the great architect Christopher Alexander. I’m a huge fan of Alexander’s work. Furthermore, I think anyone who does instructional design should read Alexander’s book. No, I don’t mean The Nature of Order, which is the book that Jay is apparently [...]
