My MATURE Project blogLast 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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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
In October and November, I will present Christine Kunzmann‘s and my approach to competency-oriented human resource development to different audiences:
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.
Yesterday, I presented at Osnabrück the first results of our work on SOPRANO. The focus of our contribution on Ontology-Centered Design of an Ambient Middleware for Assisted Living – The Case of SOPRANO was the design methodology (ontology-centered design), making ontology engineering an architectural design activity. In the course of developing an ontology with all the stakeholders, we develop a shared conceptual understanding that makes up the foundations of the architecture. This ensures higher semantic coherence in big projects.
The workshop itself was rather small and consisted mainly of contributions from the Universities of Rostock and Jena (the organizers). Although AI in ambient environments is promising, it remains the question whether the KI conference is actually the right place for such a forum.
This week I was for the fourth time at the I-KNOW Conference, which now is part of the Triple-I conference cluster (together with the I-SEMANTICS and I-MEDIA). As always, I enjoyed the days there (including food and the location), had a lot of interesting talks and meet a lot of nice, interesting, and inspiring people there.
Keynotes (by Marc A. Smith from Microsoft, Peter Reiser from Sun and Martin Eppler) were also interesting and touched the hot topic at the conference: communities and the social dimension of knowledge management and learning. At all conference parts, social software, collaboration, tagging etc. were the dominating theme.
Despite this overall positive picture, some of the talks were really shallow (especially at the I-SEMANTICS part), and I started wondering how they actually got accepted. Minor technical advancements or Yet-Another-Approach-Doing-The-Same-Thing are simply disappointment, especially combined with bad talks.
I presented our work on validating our knowledge maturing model by analyzing Wikipedia at the Special Track on Integrating Working and Learning - and announced our upcoming IP MATURE. As four key people of proposal preparation were also there, we grabbed the opportunity for celebrating our success.
I was accompanies by four colleagues presenting our work at FZI: Heiko Paoli presented his user-driven approach to semantic service descriptions, Valentin Zacharias his approach on visualizing rule bases, Mark Hefke concepts and tools relation to knowledge management maturity, and Max Völkel his approach on combining semantic web technologies with content management.
The last two days I was at Innsbruck for attending the Microlearning 2007 conference which deals with topics similar to our context-aware workplace learning support approach in LIP. The participants had a refreshing variety of backgrounds. The concept of conference was inspired by the unconference idea with getting rid of traditional paper presentations and having speedgeeking sessions and microcafé discussions. I presented the knowledge maturing idea and the concept of maturity awareness in a seven minute slot for eight times in a row (with changing audience of 3 to 6 people). This was quite an experience, and I liked the immediacy of contact with your audience, but the short slot made it hard to convey the idea. But most of all, it was exhausting… Nevertheless, I took a lot of inspiring ideas with me, probably much more than from other conferences. At some points, I would have liked to have more in-depth presentations in addition to the overview presentations and especially more in-depth discussions (also more critical ones).
The microlearning idea – as a gist – is a metaphor for a new form of learning that is flexible, fine-grained, integrated into everyday activities. The biggest challenge is how to retain guidance, certification etc., which are still important. The maturing idea, as far as I took from the discussions, perfectly fits to this metaphor of learning.
One critical thing about the conference concept: networking was not that easy because of short breaks in between. Still it was nice to meet some people again and to encounter some interesting new ones. But definitely, the confence was worth going to.
The last three days I was at the Professional Knowledge Management conference at Potsdam where the knowledge management community in the broad sense met. The FZI team (Simone Braun, Hansjörg Happel, Max Völkel and me) was very busy with five presentations, two poster presentations, and one organized workshop (ProKW – Productive Knowledge Work - together with Klaus North, Stefan Güldenberg and Tobias Ley).
The ProKW workshop was an interesting combination of the management perspective on knowledge work and the techological perspective. The implications of the characteristics, as it turned out, are currently hardly reflected. This leads to a situation – according to Klaus North – where only 2% of the potential of knowledge workers is actually made use of. In the technological track, which Tobias and I chaired, there were several interesting contributions, e.g. on a generalized notion of document (call knowledge models) from Max Völkel which enables informal exchange at a much earlier phase by lowering the barriers of exchange. Simone presented our approach to vocabulary or ontology engineering, and Andreas Rath from the Know-Center presented an approach to automatically capture the context of a learner.
Apart from that, it is interesting to see how our idea of maturing spreads. On the one side, we presented (as in a previous post) three papers on the model itself and applications to software engineering and ontology engineering. On the other side, Dr. Hofer-Alfeiss presented the Siemens approach to maturing support with “breeding strategies”.
There was also an interesting insight in the workshop on Convergence of E-Learning and Knowledge Management: whereas three years ago, I felt quite alone with my integration ideas, it is now commonsense although the concrete combination with mutual enrichment is still not clear.
Last but not least, the WM was again a good place for networking and interesting talks in the breaks – with people from very different background. However, the conference programme was a little bit too crowded and breaks were often too short.
The past three days I was at the LearnTec fair and congress in Karlsruhe. The location changed from the heart of the city to the new Karlsruhe fair facilities outside Karlsruhe. Apparently, the number of exhibitors at the fair has shrunk.
There was a clear trend aways from traditional e-learning towards more informal and collaborative forms of learning. The keynotes of Götz Werner and Martin Eppler (on visualization) were inspiring as was Hermann Maurer from Graz (who raised the important question on what we and our children need to learn in the future). The different sessions at the congress have embraced Web 2.0 and discussed the topics from different viewpoints.
Some insights for me:
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 conference took place October 1-4 near Heraklion (Crete) and was primarily organized by the PROLEARN Network of Excellence. The conference had about 200 participants and was just right in size to allow for efficient community fostering.
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