Eventually, it seems to have been worth all the these late evening phone conferences, weekend work sessions, and vacation interruptions… The MATURE IP proposal, which kept me busy in spring (and June for the hearing preparation), had a very successful evaluation (14.5 out of 15 points) in Call 1 of FP7 and (as one of two IPs in the Technology-Enhanced Learning area) officially entered contract negotiations with the EC.

The project is a large-scale continuation of our knowledge maturing research and concentrates on improving maturing of content, semantic structures and processes with the help of a personal learning & maturing environment and a corresponding organizational learning & maturing environment. It brings together an impressive team of excellent and highly motivated people I have always wanted to work with (like Stefanie Lindstaedt & Tobias Ley, Uwe Riss, Knut Hinkelmann, Ronald Maier, and Graham Attwell) or already successfully worked with in projects (like Pablo Franzolini and John Cook). I am really looking forward to coordinating the project.

A very preliminary website for the Integrating Project has been established under mature-ip.eu, but this will be improved soon. Likely project start will be in spring 2008.

Tags: MatureIP

Recently, I have completed two book chapters that fairly comprehensively summarize the results of my research on how to support workplace learning with the notion of context awareness:

• The first focuses on the ontology-based modeling and overall methodological approach. It is placed within the context of Semantic Work Environments.
  Enabling Leaning on Demand in Semantic Work Environments, to appear in Rech, Decker, Ras (eds.): Emerging Technologies for Semantic Work Environments: Techniques, Methods, and Applications, IGI Publishing, 2008
• The second focuses on the architectural issues related to introducing context awareness into e-learning solutions. It describes my service-oriented approach, which is based on a ontology-centered design methodology for deriving services and ensuring their coherence.
  Impact of Context-Awareness on the Architecture of E-Learning Solutions, to appear in Pahl (ed.): Architecture Solutions for E-Learning Systems, IGI Publishing, 2007