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Archive for the ‘conference’ Category

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.

Posted in aal, conference, soprano | 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 »

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

Posted in conference, elearning, mature-ip, publications, workplace learning | No Comments »

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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First German Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Congress 2008

Friday, February 1st, 2008

The last three days I was at the first German AAL Congress at Berlin and presented (together with my colleague Christophe Kunze) our results in the area of context-aware technologies for ambient assisted living. This encompassed intelligent sensor systems for detecting activities and other vital parameters, our ontology-centered design methodology as well as our AAL ontology from our work in SOPRANO. I had some interesting discussions with a lot of interesting people

The congress had 330 participants on the first two days alone (and they had to close registration early in January) Demographic change was the stereotypical motivation slide… And the dominating discussion theme of the German-speaking part was the lack of business models, which was seen as a main cause for the lack of market take-up. Closer inspection revealed that the majority of problems probably is due to regulatory conditions, especially in the area of health and care insurance. This is supposed to change with the new financial system of the health insurance in Germany, starting 2009 where a lot of interesting things are expected to happen. Let’s see if this helps to reduce barriers.

The European day was dominated by the new Joint AAL Programme under Article 169, which is supposed to introduce a new funding programme that is aimed at more short-term projects (2-3 years time-to-market). The first call will be published end of March/beginning of April. Available funding does not appear to be extremely high – so the call will probably be highly competetive. Expected consortia are about the size of FP7 STREPs. The proposals will be evaluated centrally (at an European level), however, the funding contracts will be made with the national authorities. Although it was claimed that the funding regulations are making it easier to participate, especially for SMEs, because of the national funding agencies, I believe this introduces additional complexity (while FP7 rules are – also for SMEs – quite simple if they have some consulting on it). The national authorities have budget limits so that situations may arise where a consortium is recommended for funding while the national funding agency does not have any money left… Probably, also with decentralized reporting, you will generate additional overhead.

The emerging AAL community appears to be an interesting mix of various disciplines with surprisingly concrete visions and a challenging field for applied research where technology can achieve much – but only if it is embedded in a holistic solution.

Posted in aal, conference, ontology, soprano | No Comments »

OnTheMove Conferences 2007 & OntoContent 2007 Workshop

Friday, November 30th, 2007

The last days I was at the OTM Conferences 2007 (for the third time) and mainly organized the OnToContent 2007 workshop together with Mustafa Jarrar (supported by the OOA and this year by SOPRANO). Although we had less submissions than the year before, we decided to keep up the quality level (with an acceptance rate of 38%) and rather have less presentations in the workshop. The strategy turned out well, and there was a lot of interaction in the workshop . Unfortunately, this year there was no high quality submission in the HR area, which is a topic particularly of interest to me.

On the ODBASE conference, my colleague Andreas Walter presented his ImageNotion application for collaborative semantic annotation of images (developed in the IMAGINATION project). By the way, Andreas currently conducts an evaluation of the tool and needs as many participants as possible. So if you want to have the chance of winning an iPod Nano with video, participate under www.imagenotion.com/go.

In the breaks, we had some interesting discussions in the “emerging community” of collaborative and evolutionary approaches to ontology engineering (especially with Pieter De Leenheer from the VU Brussels and Katharina Siorpaes from STI Innsbruck). Katharina presented on a simple, but promising game-based approach to ontology engineering, borrowing ideas from similar games for image annotation with tags.

FInally, OTM local organization was much better than last year – no serious issues apart from bad luck with keynote speakers. But Frank Leymann was there to give a very good ad hoc replacement talk.

Posted in conference, ontology | No Comments »

eChallenges 2007

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Last week I was at the eChallenges conference to present two contributions from our research. The first one was about the current status of AGENT-DYSL on reading support for dyslexia:

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The second presentation was on our competency-oriented human resource development approach:

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HCSIT 2007 / ePortfolio 2007 – Ontologies, employability and e-portfolios

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

The last two days I was at Maastricht for the Human Capital & Social Innovation Summit (HCSIT 07), which encompasses among other events also the ePortfolio conference. I was invited by Luk Vervenne and the VUB STARLAB to present our competency-oriented approach together with Tobias Ley from the Know-Center, Graz and Clementina Marinoni in an OOA session. The track was aimed at bringing together researchers on the topic of competencies with a special focus on semantics and the potential influence on the HR-XML standardization. It was a promising insight that the different approaches are actually complementary, and discussions revealed that there is a high degree of mutual agreement so that we may in the future actually come to a shared framework. In the OOA session, there was attempt for online conceptual modeling, but time was way too short for such an approach so that the result was not convincing. A wrap-up is of the session is available.

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It was interesting to see that there is interest for semantic technologies from various sides, e.g., it is increasingly acknowledged that complex standards may need for their own coherence, but especially for interaction with other standards a conceptual layer on top. This is clearly inspired by model-driven ideas from software engineering. Despite this interest and remarkable awareness of ontological approaches, there is still a lot of doubt because semantic technologies still lack their applications. Probably, we need to continue to work on pragmatic and useful solutions instead of complex and powerful ones, just to show that it works and delivers a benefit.

E-Portfolios are a promising concept – for various purposed. However, I am not sure whether the single label portfolio actually denotes a shared concept and whether it is beneficial to consider all types of portfolios as instances of a single concept. For me, still, a reflective work portfolio a student at school/university actually uses as a way to organize learning is very different from a portfolio used for student assessment or for applying to a potential employer. Mixing different purposes may prevent effective usage. So for me, transfering portfolios from one system to another has no priority, but rather making it easy to transfer individual items makes sense. And this probably best in the context of a personal learning environment – and not restricted to transfer between portfolios, but also exchange with other systems so that maturing processes across individuals can take place. Anyway, I see a huge potential of bringing the e-portfolio community and the workplace learning/knowledge management community together – it can open up the perspective to holistic concepts.

The keynotes on the second day were very interesting. I was especially surprised about how quickly the Dutch government introduces innovative employability solutions, compared to the cumbersome German procedures and discussions. Especially the policy that you have to give a data about you only once to the government would be healthy. Some may have privacy concerns, but I think that much more annoying and dangerous is collecting data again and again, each time with the possibilty that a new error is introduced.

When I listened to Thomas Sporer’s talk on an eportfolio-based approach to university education, it came again to my mind how old-fashioned our university education system currently is: it does not help students in building competencies in setting goals on their own, working with uncertainty, social interaction within a project context, presentation competencies etc. Let’s hope that things will change with approaches like that one so that students become really employable at the end of their studies.

Finally, the conference was a good place for meeting interesting people with various backgrounds.

Technorati tags: eportfolio07, hcscit07

Posted in competencies, conference, hr, ontology | No Comments »

Upcoming Competency Autumn

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

In October and November, I will present Christine Kunzmann‘s and my approach to competency-oriented human resource development to different audiences:

We were invited to present our ontology-driven approach to the HR-XML community at the Human Capital and Social Innovation Summit 2007 in Maastricht on October 17, 2007. There is a special session (organized by the Ontology Outreach Advisory), exploring the potential of semantics and competency frameworks for the future evolution of HR-XML. My talk will especially focus on competency relationships.
At the eChallenges 2007 in Den Haag (October 24-26), I will present the approach under the special focus of sustainability (see our paper on Sustainable Competency-Oriented Human Resource Development): how can approaches based on competency ontologies actually be maintained over time. The ideas presented there are a precursor to the research in the MATURE IP.
Christine and I were also invited to present an overview of the paradigm of competency-oriented human resource development at the Professional Training Facts 2007 on November 13 at Stuttgart. At the same event, my colleague Simone Braun was also invited to give a talk on social issues in informal learning support.

Although this will mean a lot of traveling, I am looking forward to talk with different communities, get feedback on our work, possibilities to apply them in different companies, and fresh ideas on how to continue our research.

Posted in competencies, conference, km | No Comments »

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Archive for the ‘conference’ Category