The Pedagogical Patterns Project began at OOPSLA '95 and started holding workshops in 1996 at the ECOOP, TOOLS and OOPSLA conferences. The aim of the project has been to capture successful experiences in teaching and learning object technology, from industry or academia, in a homogeneous, easily-accessible format. Patterns have been regarded as an effective method for achieving this. Since 1996, many other sessions have been held at numerous conferences in America and Europe, resulting in the collection of more than 50 teaching techniques written in pattern format. As this present collection is now being refined and expanded, educators are discovering the effectiveness of sharing their teaching experiences in the form of pedagogical patterns.

Jutta Eckstein, Mary Lynn Manns and Markus Voelter explain.

Open standards for interoperating agent-based systems

This paper provides an overview of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) standardisation effort in the area of specifying standards for heterogeneous, interoperating agent-based systems. Jonathan Dale and Ebrahim Mamdani describe the types of software agents that are of interest to FIPA, the methods by which FIPA members collaborate and produce specifications and also descriptions of the specifications that FIPA has produced. Also, we list the available implementations of FIPA specifications and applications that use these implementations. Finally, we describe the current and future work of FIPA.