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Archive for the ‘events’ Category

Workshop on Motivational and Affective Aspects of Technology-Enhanced Learning (MATEL 2010)

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Based on the experiences in MATURE, we are trying to form an interdisciplinary community around the topic of motivational and affective aspects in technology-enhanced learning. Towards that end, we are organizing a workhop (MATEL 2010) at this year’s edition of the ECTEL conference, which takes place in Barcelona, Spain.

We invite contributions from the areas of psychology, sociology, computer science, CSCW, economics, among others.

Tags: matureip
Posted in CfP, elearning, mature-ip, motivation | No Comments »

SOPRANO Conference

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Last week I was at the SOPRANO Conference, which presents results of our AAL Integrated Project SOPRANO to the interested public. It was colocated with the fair on home automation Beurs Domotica & Slim Wonen at Eindhoven. Apart from the key SOPRANO contributions, we had presentations from the European Commission on their strategy of facilitating the development and deployment of AAL solutions (Peter Wintlev- Jensen), on general acceptance issues by Heidrun Mollenkopf (BAGSO) on ethical aspects of AAL research (by Marjo Rauhala from Vienna), and from the PERSONA project. It really has given a good overview of the current state of research, and the open issues. Particularly the lack of deployment was addressed as part of the panel discussion. There were several opinions on this:

Lack of societal awareness about the problems that demand for AAL solutions (we will not be able to deliver care in the same way as today as there will be many more older people than now). This leads to a lack of political support.
Lack of awareness by the immediate carers about the possibilities, availability, and cost/benefits of AAL solutions and potentially threatening change of the role of the carer
Too high a pace of innovation, which leads to hesistant investments
Immaturity of the technology as to practical usability and cost effectiveness
Lack of direct end customer approach (start with the more prosperous as early adopters)

Probably it is a mixture of all of it, but I found particularly the first one convincing as it changes the perspective: we now longer ask what added-value this technology can deliver in addition to care services and informal carers, but we ask how can we keep up a similar level of care for a much larger number of older people with fewer younger carers.

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What indicators and other management instruments might have to do with knowledge (maturing)

Friday, November 20th, 2009

While MATURE has always been inspired by bottom-up developments (and the concept of knowledge maturing has this an inherent assumption), we have always emphasized the importance of top-down activities as well. We have avoided to use the term “management” here, but rather used the term guidance for that. So far, we have mainly concentrated on value-based and valuation-based guidance (showing by appreciation what is considered good practice, which is usually subsumed in a notion of team/corporate culture), and structural guidance (i.e., the establishment and nurturing of communication structures). Furthermore, we have been struggling with potentials and dangers of incentive structures, mainly monetary/material and career incentives.

This week we were at the Professional Training Facts 2009 in Stuttgart (see here for a summary of MATURE activities at this event). This was a great opportunity to think and discuss about topics around competence development in company. One trend I have spotted was the increasing importance of indicators for competence development and the incorporation of those indicators into management instruments like management-by-objectives. At first sight, this always seems to be a good idea to “professionalize” the learning element in a company by making it measurable. This originates in the assumption that “you cannot manage what you cannot measure”, which is probably true when you want to manage things. The approach promises transparency and can be a step towards calculating an ROI for learning. The big problem, however, does not lie in the approach of defining indicators and measuring them, but rather in the concrete indicators themselves. These indicators do not naturally naturally derive from the topic at hand, but are actually always bound to a notion of an ideal state; they contain the statement: you should have a high score in this indicator – this would be the best option. This is not bad as such, but this fact is rarely reflected, especially because this ideal state is actually context-dependent. It can be different for large vs. small organizations, for innovation-focused vs. efficiency-focused organizations, for service vs. production etc. What happens is that somebody defines (probably with good reasons) a certain set of indicators, and other simply take those indicators and apply them without questioning their value for their context.

What does this have to do with knowledge and knowledge maturing? This has three aspects:

This “ideal state” conception as such is a body of knowledge, and it has to be carefully examine if the underlying knowledge about the ideal state is has reached a level of maturity that allows for a standardization in which you usually simply take things and apply them (like, e.g., for many financial indicators). Or if we are on a lower level of maturity and have to develop from there our own answer to the question “what is the ideal state”. In this learning and maturing process we have to learn about the contextual factors that differentiate us from others. And even if we take and apply standardized things, we should allow and encourage questioning usefulness at any time.
Indicators are not only about measuring, they are about management and guidance. They aim at changing the behaviour by explicitly or implictly encouraging to become “better”. Even if we know sufficiently about the ideal state, do we know enough how a certain set of indicators (potentially tied together with a complex formula) influences the behaviour? Is our knowledge about that mature enough to make them the basis for formalized instruments (like reward schemes, but also career decisions)? Can we differentiate between correlations and causal relationships? Can we separate external factors? Or should be modest enough to consider them what they are: indicators that measure something, but not the wealth of reality, and use them as a reflection instrument – and in the end maybe come to the conclusion that they measure nothing of interest.
We are currently researching indicators for knowledge maturing both in the empirical and the technical-conceptual strand of the MATURE project. We should be aware that indicators always derive from a concept of ideal state, which is difficult to envision as a whole. So we will base those indicators based on our pre-conceptions (which has a lot to do with our value systems) – and we should carefully reflect on this problem.

As a conclusion: measuring can be very helpful for many aspects, also on the soft side, but we should understanding the development and application of such measuring instruments as a collaborative learning process which should involve many. Then this process and its result can be also a good guidance instrument.

Technorati-Tags: matureip

Posted in hr, km, mature-ip, maturing, symposium | No Comments »

Towards a shared understanding of competencies

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Today I was invited to a meeting of the IEEE LTSC WG20 for starting a liaison activity between the various stakeholders in competency-based data management. Its goal was to form a group for developing a shared conceptual model. I have presented a very brief summary of our work in that area:

Competency Orientation within Companies: The Challenge of Different Requirements

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt.

Here is also the position paper.

One of my main points was that we need to look at the use cases and their specific requirements as many of the misunderstandings come from the implicit assumption of a certain use case. Our initial analysis of use cases is reported here:

Simone Braun, Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt
People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: Towards Collaborative Competence Management
In: David Randall and Pascal Salembier (eds.): From CSCW to Web2.0: European Developments in Collaborative Design Selected Papers from COOP08, Computer Supported Cooperative Work vol. , Springer, 2010

Some use cases, like people finding, only rely on very weak notions of interests, while others – like career planning and rewarding schemes – rely on sound competency definitions. This is very important to understand – because all of them tend to speak of competencies. This also helps to understand why in some cases >700 competencies are appropriate, and in others 20 might be sufficient.

For a general conceptual model, I have pointed out the following challenges:

Competencies are cultural abstractions
Competency definitions are implicitly contextualized and a certain degree of ambiguity will always remain.
Competency definitions are purpose-driven conceptualizations
Competencies are time-dependent conceptualizations

Posted in competencies, events, mature-ip | No Comments »

I-KNOW 2009 & the first steps towards motivational design for informal learning tools

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

Last week we were at Graz, first for a MATURE Consortium Meeeting and then for the I-KNOW conference, which I always enjoy for its atmosphere. It is far more relaxed and suitable for networking with long lunch and coffee breaks in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the quality of the talks did not live up to my expectations based on previous years’ experience (despite the fact that the MATURE project contributed 7 presentations and one poster presentation). This is strikingly similar to the WM 2009 in Solothurn. Is this a (rather alarming) indicator that traditional knowledge management forums do not attract the top research contributions? Or is the topic as such no longer fashionable?

On the other side, the event hosted the kick-off event for the Special Interest Group on Professional Learning (www.sig-protel.eu), which tries to increase the visibility of the topic on a European level, first by better networking among the concerned European research projects like MATURE, APOSDLE, ROLE, and others. In the discussion, it has turned out that despite the ambiguity of the term, professional learning seems to be umbrella term for KM and workplace learning. This SIG is a promising sign for a maturing community.

This year, Christine and I were giving a talk on integrating motivational aspects into the design of informal learning support, which reported on our findings on how to integrating motivational measures into tools for informal learning (the paper is available from here). Christine has done most of the work in ethnographic studies and their analysis. Currently, together with our colleague Athanasios, they are struggling to integrate their ideas into the four demonstrators of MATURE Year 2 demonstrators.

Integrating Motivational Aspects into the Design of Learning Support in Organizations

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt.

Technorati-Tags: matureip,motivation,iknow,km

Posted in conference, hr, km, mature-ip, motivation, publications, workplace learning | No Comments »

OnlineEduca Berlin 2008

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

On Thursday and Friday I had the opportunity to go to the OnlineEduca Berlin. It is a huge combined congress and fair with over 2.000 participants from more than 90 countries. For my taste, this is way too big – it creates an atmosphere of restlessness and anonymity where meeting people is possible, but you do not really feel like spending enough time on really exchanging ideas. Breaks are too short, sessions too many. But it appears that others do not share this opinion – otherwise they would not come to the event repeatedly.

Well, apart from that, there were interesting keynotes on the first day: Michael Wesch, a anthropologist from Kansas presentedwho managed that his home-made YouTube video became an incredible success (and he has since then produced several interesting ones! – my colleague Valentin already recommended one of them in his recent blog entries), but also Norbert Bolz (who was less entertaining, but also had interesting ideas) like the importance of self-branding.

While there was no single big conference theme, I gained the impression that the two big topics were serious games and (with some distance) mobile learning. There was some reference to personal learning environments (e.g., by Fronter) and the obligatory reference to Web 2.0, but few consequences could be seen.

I myself presented MATURE from an (almost) non-technical perspective, highlighting new approaches to guidance via the gardening metaphor and the necessity of a participatory culture:

Additionally, Gilbert Peffer from CIMNE organized a session on serious games for the financial domain (both for private financial decisions and for professional trader training), and provided a possibility to look into the upcoming xDELIA project (where FZI a is also involved both from the sensor side and from the perspective of experimental economics).

On the day before OnlineEduca, I participated in the ICOPER event on Competencies as the Currency for Learning, which aims at bootstrapping a standardization effort on competencies. More about that in the blog entry on the MATURE blog.

Technorati-Tags: oeb08,onlineeducaberlin,matureip,icoper

Posted in competencies, conference, education, elearning, hr, km, mature-ip, maturing, workplace learning | No Comments »

AKWM Symposion 2008, Karlsruhe

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Yesterday, I was at this year’s edition of the AKWM Symposion, which is the yearly event of the Karlsruhe working group on knowledge management. The organizers always manage to find interesting speakers and presenters, among them the following:

Wim Veen from TU Delft opened the day with his insights around the Homo Zappiens and highlighted the radical shifts difference in media exposure, consumption, and perception of children of the digital age. In contrast to others, he viewed this change not as generally bad, but rather emphasized that multi-player games like World of Warcraft let’s children learn social collaboration behavior, and that parallel usage of different channels help to form the important skill of multitasking. He suggested that as parents and educators we should be less worried about the usage of computers, mobile phones, and other media devices, but rather immerse into those new environments to understand them better and to be able to provide guidance.

Gabi Reinmann from University of Augsburg presented conceptual foundations for personal knowledge management based on her book “Wissenswege” (paths of/toward knowledge), which could be interesting to incorporate into the MATURE discussion on Personal Learning Environments At the end of her talk she presented results from two studies on knowledge bloggers (researchers and teachers), whose emotional/motivational aspects could be crucial for the notion of PLEs, too: experience of competence, social integration, and autonomy. Particularly the latter one could be a challenges and source of conflict for PLEs within organizations – one example in the discussion mentioned that external blogging platforms are preferred over corporate blogging platforms because of the aspect of autonomy.

Manfred Spitzer from the University Hospital Ulm gave a very inspiring talk on the neuropsychological insights of learning. Apart from the entertaining style of presentation, he was also able to communicate the key findings of neuropsychological research in recent years, e.g.,

the role of positive and negative emotions on learning effects: learning based on negative emotions (particularly fear) is very quick, but blocks any form of creativity; positive emotions can boost learning outcomes as it increases neural activity
the differences between children and adults: while learning can be very quick in childhood, adult learning is slower – which does not mean that one is better than the other

Additionally, he had a very strong opinion on how the education system should look like and that modern media (like TV, but also computers) have a bad impact on the development of children. He suggested to expose children to the Internet after the age of 17, opposed the – it would have been interesting to have a panel discussion with Wim Veen. After all, I don’t think that there is any radical answer to the challenges of the digital age, neither protection against, nor uncriticial embracing of the “digital native” phenomenon. But another suggestion from him is definitely a good idea: evidence-based education and conducting more empirical educational research on the effectiveness of pedagogical concepts and methods.

He has a similarly strong opinion on the use of Powerpoint (he opposed the fact that children at school are forced to use Powerpoint for their slides) – and cited the NASA Columbia accident assessment where Powerpoint-based communication was considered one of the causes. Well, probably he was one of the example that very good presenters do not need Powerpoint slides at all, but I would argue that the use of slides makes helps average and less-than-average presenters.

As a replacement for Franz Reinisch, I had the opportunity to present MATURE as one of the key activities in the knowledge management field of the iRegion Karlsruhe. The presentation particularly highlighted the potential of the knowledge maturing approach to overcome the separation of knowledge management and learning.

Hans-Peter Schnurr from Ontoprise and Prof. Rudi Studer from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and FZI moderated the session and gave an overview of the cluster initiative iRegion, aimed at fostering the IT cluster Karlsruhe (which is among the top 3 in Europe).

Technorati-Tags: akwm,matureip,knowledge_management,km,education

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WM2009 Workshop on Knowledge Services & Mashups (KSM09)

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

http://ksm09.mature-ip.eu

Part of the Conference on Professional Knowledge Management (WM 2009)

Organizers & Contact

Tobias Ley, Know-Center, Graz, Austria
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center, Graz, Austria
Andreas Schmidt, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany

Important Dates

October 31, 2008 Submission of workshop papers
December 15, 2008 Notification of authors about acceptance/rejection
January 10, 2009 Submission of camera-ready papers

Endorsed by


APOSDLE IP	MATURE IP

Introduction & Motivation

Large monolithic knowledge management systems as the one-for-all KM solution have largely failed to live up to their expectations. In particular, they have failed

to integrate into work practices of the individual, thus lacking adoption by the individual
to adapt to different types and sizes of companies, different type of employees as well as changing requirements of those
to acknowledge that knowledge management is not an isolated activity within a company, but rather an activity of “networked individuals”

In line with the trend towards modular service-oriented architectures, we can observe that knowledge management solutions increasingly adopt more modular approaches. However, these developments are usually merely a decomposition into software components without taking into account the user of such systems. But the notion of service goes beyond components; it usually assumes that the granularity of functionality as well as packaging is motivated by usage patterns (e.g., business processes) and not purely technical (software engineering) considerations.

This means that the shift from integrated knowledge management solutions towards knowledge services is not only a question of modularity, but also requires rethinking offer and demand (by knowledge workers) of such services. And it also requires a thorough understand of knowledge work and new conceptual foundations for its support (e.g., the knowledge maturing model by Maier & Schmidt or the seeding-evolutionary growth-reseeding model by Fischer) to identify basic knowledge services and their interplay, which constitutes another issue of service-orientation: combination or orchestration of different services to provide higher-level functionality. That is the real power of service-oriented approaches.

In the context of Web 2.0 (which in itself is a user-oriented approach to web applications where the social ecology is explicitly considered), the notion of mashups has emerged as an integration paradigm which is lightweight and easy such that:

end-users themselves can combine different services (like aggregating and filtering feeds of content, calendar information etc.)
applications and services can easily participate and offer those feeds

This goes beyond service-orientation (which is about empowering the enterprise to creating their own solutions without relying on vendor prepackaging) and realizes end-user empowerment as well.

A recent development in the related field of learning support is constituted by personal learning environments, replacing LMS similar to services and mashups replacing KMS. They envision a work environment of individual tools (e.g., for communication, sharing, awareness, collaboration, networking) that allow the individual for organizing her learning in a very personal way. They offer a construction set of small services to be configured by the individual user.

The workshop aims at bringing these strands of development of service-oriented approaches to supporting knowledge management and learning together to go one step further beyond the enthusiasm about Knowledge Management 2.0, which is essentially about social software for knowledge management. The scope of the workshop ranges from theoretical and conceptual foundations (which might come from various disciplines), methodical contributions up to technical prototype development and gathering experiences from evaluations.

Theoretical and conceptual foundations of knowledge services and mash-ups

Notion of knowledge services and mashups
Theories and concepts of knowledge work
Requirements for knowledge services and mash-ups

Knowledge Service and Mashup engineering

for personal knowledge management and learning (including personal learning environments)
for supporting communities and social networking
for organizational knowledge management

Personalization and contextualization of services and mash-ups

Knowledge representations and models for services
Semantic models and metadata

Knowledge Service Architectures and integration concepts

Lightweight mash-up approaches to the combination of different knowledge services
Semantic service descriptions
Evaluation of knowledge services and mash-ups

Submission Instructions

All papers in the conference proceedings have to be formatted according to the following instructions under http://www.gi-ev.de/service/publikationen/lni/ (in German; Latex Template, Word Template). We solicit submissions of the following types:

Research papers
Case studies and experience reports from industry
Position papers and work-in-progress
Demonstrations

Paper submissions should should not exceed 10 pages, descriptions of demos should not exceed 5 pages.

For submissions, please use the electronic submission system under http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wm2009workshops and select the KSM workshop as track.

Programme Committee

Andreas Abecker, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany
Steffen Lamparter, Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI), University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Mathias Lux, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Johannes Magenheim, University of Paderborn (TBC)
Ronald Maier, Leopold-Franzens-University of Innsbruck, Austria
Gregoris Mentzas, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Claudia Müller, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research, Austria
York Sure, SAP AG, Germany
Robert Woitsch, BOC, Austria

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ECTEL 2008 – "Time for Convergence" @ Maastricht

Friday, September 19th, 2008

This week I had the opportunity to attend the 3rd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning at Maastricht in the Netherlands. It was a good networking opportunity for the TEL community, which some dubbed as a “big family” (with all the different aspects of a family). About 130 participants included mostly players from the European projects in the TEL area.

There were some interesting key notes:

Kia Höök inspired the participants to consider the body and the affective dimension of human behavior in their research and development. I think that there is a huge potential, particularly if we want truly holistic and motivating/engaging learning experiences, although it is not easy to see how to transfer her research results, e.g., to workplace learning support. One step in that direction could be the upcoming Call 3 STREP xDELIA where my colleague Clemens van Dinther is involved in and which will deal with emotions.
Manu Kapur reported on his experiments on “productive failure”, which showed that students who fail in groups confronted with ill-structured problems outperform those who are successful in groups with well-structured problems even in well-structured problem domains. This implies that short-term failure may not be a reliable indicator for longer term learning success.

ECTEL08 has given itself the mission “Time of convergence”, aiming at bridging different learning contexts. The discussions at the conference showed that convergence it still at its beginning. This manifested in the recurring debates about the role of informal learning and whether the TEL community should target that more (as APOSDLE and MATURE have started):

There was an increasing number of presentations and discussion contributions (e.g, from Graham Attwell as part of the MATURE PLE conceptualizations), including the keynote by Roy Pea who emphasized the role of informal learning compared to formal learning (e.g., only 5% of a student’s learning is within formal contexts).
On the other side, Pierre Dillenbourg doubted that this turn towards the “informal” is helpful for the TEL community (he still acknowledges the importance of informal learning) and suspects that this emerging shift of attention is because of frustration about not being able to change the formal system.
Rob Koper emphasized in the closing panel that if we want to have informal learning support, we should first work on the acknowledgment and valuing of informal activities in career development.

The EC (represented by Pat Manson, Marco Marsella, and Martin Májek) explained that investments into TEL have so far not entered practice in a sufficient way. Stefanie Lindstaedt pointed out that industry could be faster to introduce workplace learning tools, but for that we need to provide evidence about the impact, and this can only be achieved if we do not focus on short term effects, but also on longer term effects.

Also for MATURE, this was a good event. On the first day, MATURE presented the first results of the five months of the project and organized a workshop on Learning in Enterprise 2.0. This was a very good opportunity to bring together the different strands of development (ethnography, concept development, and technical integration of existing tools within design studies) in an open atmosphere and to receive feedback from the community. Additionally, Graham Attwell presented the rolling out of a first simple PLE based on Freefolio in the UK, which is closely linked to MATURE activities.

Technorati tags: ectel08, matureip

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Learning in Enterprise 2.0 Workshop and first MATURE results

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Next week, I will attend the ECTEL 2008 conference at Maastricht. Together with several others I am organizing the LEB 2008 workshop (Learning in Enterprise 2.0 and Beyond), which aims at exploring the implications of web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 to learning in enterprises. This will also be a good opportunity to see the results of the first five months of the MATURE IP and to get into discussion with us:

Informal learner styles: Individuation, interaction, in-form-ation (Ronald Maier, Stefan Thalmann)
This contributions presents an informal learning typology based on the first ethnographic study.
Concept of a Tool Wrapper Infrastructure for Supporting Services in a PLE (Tobias Nelkner, Wolfgang Reinhardt, Graham Attwell)
The authors present further steps towards the notion of a personal learning environment in enterprises.
Ontologies, Dialogue and Knowledge Maturing: Towards a Mashup and Design Study (Andrew Ravenscroft, Simone Braun, John Cook, Andreas Schmidt, Jenny Bimrose, Alan Brown, Claire Bradley)
This contribution introduces a design study of combining the SOBOLEO tool for supporting ontology maturing and the Interloc tool for argument games.

Technorati tags: matureip, ectel08

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