The upcoming Professional Knowledge Management conference WM 2007 at Potsdam will provide the possibility to get a closer look at our ongoing research around the theme of knowledge maturing, which represents a macroscopical phase model for describing interindividual learning processes. The following three publication deal with the issue from different perspective

• The first publication (together with Ronald Maier from the University of Halle-Wittenberg) combines the phase model with an organizational learning model and develops criteria for describing the different phases.

  Ronald Maier, Andreas Schmidt:
  Characterizing Knowledge Maturing: A Conceptual Process Model for Integrating E-Learning and Knowledge Management
  In: 4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management: Experiences and Visions (WM 07), Workshop on Convergence of Knowledge Management and E-Learning (CKME ‘07), Potsdam, March 2007. PDF

• The second publication, originating from our Wissensnetz project, transfers the idea of knowledge maturing, understood as maturing of knowledge structures in the human mind and corresponding information artifacts, to the level of vocabulary and terminology, i.e., into ontology maturing. This transfer provides interesting insights into real-world ontology-engineering, bridging the tagging and the formal ontology paradigms. Our publication presents a light-weight ontology editor reflecting these ideas in knowledge work processes, but this is only a result at the very beginning.

  Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Valentin Zacharias:
  Ontology Maturing with Lightweight Collaborative Ontology Editing Tools
  In: 4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management: Experiences and Visions (WM 07), Workshop on Productive Knowledge Work (ProKW 07), Potsdam, March 2007, PDF

• The third publication, together with Hans-Jörg Happel from FZI, transfers the idea to software components to software engineering in order to provide new insights into software reuse processes. If we understand these reuse processes as learning processes, this provides the bridge between knowledge management/organizational learning and software engineering practice.

  Hans-Jörg Happel, Andreas Schmidt:
  Knowledge Maturing as a Process Model for Describing Software Reuse
  In: 4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management: Experiences and Visions (WM 07), Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO 2007), Potsdam, March 2007, PDF

It will be interesting to explore further where the maturing concept can provide new insights and how the different application areas can cross-fertilize one another. If you have further ideas, please send them. I will be happy to collaborate on that issue!

The Knowledge Media Research Center organized a workshop on educational portals (Workshop Bildungsportale) where I was invited as a panelist for the closing panel on educational portals and Web 2.0 together with Reinhard Keil (Uni Paderborn), Klaus Birkenbihl (W3C) and others.

Although the focus was more on portals for schools and universities, it turned out to be a very interesting event on the changing role of portals in Web 2.0. Especially, our view that grassroot Web 2.0 approaches (characterized by blogging and tagging) and more top-down Semantic Web approaches do not contradict, but rather complement one another although it is not clear how both of them fit together.  Also the trend towards portals as service providers (instead of information providers)was common sense among the panelists.

Interesting approaches were presented (among others) by Benjamin Birkenhage (ZEIT online), Richard Heinen (Lehrer-Online), Stephan Mosel (Bildungsblog), Thomas Sporer (University of Augsburg, Knowledgebay) and Stefanie Panke (IWM-KMRC, e-teaching.org).

There will be a book about the workshop which will be published next year where a digest of the different views will be collected. Stay tuned.

Learning support activities are increasingly recognizing the importance of competencies as abstractions of human capabilities and behavior. This covers traditional human resource development and training, vocational training and even school education, but also e-learning and competence management. There are many interesting approaches that have shown the feasibility of competency-oriented methods, several large research projects investigate competency-related issues (like APOSDLE and TENcompetence), and our research has provided also some insight into the relationship of organizational and individual competencies and how they can be exploited. But before we can deal with competencies efficiently on a large scale, many open issues need to be resolved, culminating in competency-related standards. The Study Group Competencies has established itself as an international special interest group with people like Claude Ostyn, Wayne Hodgins, Eric Duval, Luk Vervenne among several others. I have participated in the first conference call, and my first impression is that although there is still a very long way to go towards a shared understanding of competencies and their usage, such initiatives are important to bring people together – beyond traditional European research projects. Next conference call is scheduled for mid-January.