Andreas Schmidt Weblog

Search
Twitter Updates
Categories
- events (35)
  - CfP (6)
  - conference (21)
  - learntec (1)
  - symposium (7)
- project (34)
  - agent-dysl (2)
  - mature-ip (19)
  - mirror (3)
  - myui (2)
  - soprano (8)
  - universaal (4)
- publications (13)
- tools (2)
  - mediawiki (1)
- topics (60)
  - aal (10)
  - adaptivity (1)
  - affective (1)
  - competencies (15)
  - context (12)
  - education (3)
  - elearning (14)
  - hr (11)
  - km (14)
  - maturing (21)
  - microlearning (1)
  - motivation (4)
  - ontology (10)
  - project management (1)
  - workplace learning (20)
Archive
My MATURE Project blog
Tags
aal competence ectel10 elearning enterprise20 hr km knowledge_management learning matureip mirror-ip ontology pwm2011 reflection scohrid soprano web20 web30

Archive for the ‘mature-ip’ Category

Professional Knowledge Management (WM 2011)

Saturday, February 26th, 2011

The last days I was at the Professional Knowledge Management conference in Innsbruck, organized by Ronald Maier and his team (really well done!). While there were respectable ~150 participants (with a lot of “known faces”), it is also obvious that knowledge management is no longer a hype topic. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially because among the participants there was a consensus that this event provides value to the participants in terms of exchanging ideas.

The hot topics (some which have been around for quite some years) from my perception were:

social software and its sibling enterprise 2.0
human factors of knowledge management

In addition, leadership has emerged in many places although little concrete contributions could be spotted (apart from the keynote talk by von Krogh). Definitely not a hot topic was technology as such, and I could even sense a lot of aversion against too much technology in the field. Particularly, anything related to AI was not welcome at all at the conference – although it was raised in some discussions. This reaffirms the shift of knowledge management from technology towards human and organizational factors. While I would agree that this is a good path, the conference has also shown to me that we are still struggling in research with its implications on research goals and methods. Definitely it will mean more empirical research (like we started in the MATURE project), particularly beyond questionnaires with the use of ethnographic methods and case studies (like Koch & Richter do). For more technology-oriented research, this will probably increase the importance of design research approaches. Definitely, we still more maturity of knowledge on this new paradigm of knowledge management that goes beyond rather generic principles.

I had the opportunity of giving an invited talk at the talkIT workshop, organized by the local “Standortagentur” of Tyrol. I have outline the implications of knowledge maturing on developing IT solutions (basically shifting models from design-time to run-time constructs) and on the competencies required for IT workers.

Verstehen, einbinden, verändern – Wissensreifungsprozesse gestalten

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt

Together with my colleagues Christine Kunzmann and Athanasios Mazarakis, I have also organized the workshop on Motivational, Social and Cultural Aspects of Knowledge Management. For this workshop, I gave a keynote talk which summarized the findings of our empirical studies in MATURE:

Motivationale, soziale und kulturelle Faktoren im Wissensmanagement

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt

There were great discussions in the workshop, but I have left with the impression that beyond common sense, we still know little about motivational, social, and cultural aspects in terms of implications for designing systems. I am looking forward to further research on the subject.

Tags: pwm2011
Posted in conference, km, mature-ip, motivation, workplace learning | 1 Comment »

STELLAR Stakeholders Distinct Award for Paper on Knowledge Maturing Activities

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

The MATURE paper on the findings on knowledge maturing activities from the interview study has won the STELLAR Stakeholder Distinct Award at ECTEL 2010.

The paper was chosen due to its ubiquity; the work […] can help to address large-scale challenges in the areas of employment, economic success, an organizational competitiveness. Its insights regarding the links between Knowledge Maturing and the practical application of formal education have impressively broad base. […] It was chosen not only because of an interesting and important topic, but also due to its comprehensible language. The paper was found to be highly relevant to formal education, continuing development, policy making, and ICT/TEL industry. Furthermore, the stakeholder advisory board found it to have high potential with regards to exploitability, scalability, and transferability across Europe, as well as globally. The work described in the paper was evaluated as highly innovative with regards to pedagogical, organizational, and socio-cultural aspects.

(Picture courtesy of Paul de Bra)

Here are the slides:

Knowledge Maturing Activities and Practices Fostering Organisational Learning: Results of an Empirical Study

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt.

Posted in conference, elearning, km, mature-ip, maturing, workplace learning | Comments Off

Motivations and Emotions in Technology-Enhanced Learning: The MATEL Workshop at ECTEL 2010

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

Today I had the pleasure to chair the MATEL workshop at this year’s edition of the ECTEL conference, which I have organized together with my colleagues Christine Kunzmann, Athanasios Mazarakis, and Simone Braun as well Teresa Holocher from CSI in Vienna and Ulrike Cress from KMRC in Tübingen. The workshop focussed on motivational and affective aspects in TEL. It was broadcasted to the ICT 2010 event in Brussels, and there is an archive of the video stream (choose Tuesday for the MATEL workshop).

It was a great workshop with lot of interactivity and true interdisciplinary audience. I had the honour to open the workshop with a keynote talk, setting the theme of the workshop and presenting results from the MATURE project (including work from Christine and Athanasios).

Motivation, affective aspects, and knowledge maturing

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt.

Within MATURE, we could identify motivational barriers, which include “lack of time” (which related to priorities and the value of certain activities), organization & team culture. One lesson we have taken that solutions should be designed for individual benefits (and not just organizational ones) and for individual users. Towards that end, immersion into context is a key technique.

Ulrike Cress afterwards presented her work on knowledge sharing and collaboration behaviour, which starts from the problem that “knowlegde sharing is not attractive, and takes effort”, which is the root cause for a social dilemma (individual interest vs. group interest).

During the discussion of Andrew Ravenscroft on Designing for TEL, we have touched the issue of what kind of motivation we are actually targetting at. This was a tough question that was not easy to solve during the workshop, but is clearly necessary to define in the future. Possible interpretations:

motivate individuals to share knowledge?
motivate to use tools (like we designed them)?
motivate to learn?
motivate to adapt to new developments?

After the talks of Virginia Dignum and Erin Knight on the perspectives from student learning, the role of scaffolding was intensely discussed, but from a tool perspective, but also more traditional methods like coaching. This was also related to tool usage (it is not that easy for students to use Web 2.0 as you might expect). This raised – as at several points during the day – an interesting discussion on the differences between intended use and actual use of a tool. The Web 2.0 principle is we design with less intended use and leave more flexibility for actual use, which increases the need for scaffolding. Otherwise the pre-defined structure of the tool already represents the scaffolding.

In the last slot in the presentation from Christian Voigt, we finally had a talk on the affective dimension, which raised the discussion on the role of emotions and their relationship to motivation, which appeared to be a difficult one. It was found that the role of emotions in learning processes was much less researched than the role of motivation.

The workshop then selected topics that should be followed upon in the group discussions in the afternoon. These included:

Emotions vs. motivation
What should be motivated? What should be the motivational cause?
Supporting social relations (confidence & trust in shared information spaces)
Automated adaptivity to learners’ goals, motivation, and skills
Motivational triggers in social web spaces
How much facilitation does it need?
Motivational aspects in scaffolding collaborative learning
Intended vs. actual use (Web 2.0 bottom-up vs. instructional top-down)
Autonomy: defining learning goals vs. choosing from learning opportunities

We finally decided on “emotions vs. motivation”, which turned out to be a very interesting discussion, which can summarized as follows:

The relationship between emotions and learning outcome (and work performance similarly) is not an easy one – negative emotions can increase the learning and work performance.
The relationship between emotions and motivation is likewise not an easy one.
The role of emotions (and motivation) increases in informal learning contexts compared to formal context as in formal context “having to do sth.” overcomes temporary emotional and motivational aspects.
The are different ways of using emotions, e.g., detecting and making the individual aware of emotions (like MIRROR and xDELIA), providing the possibility for communicating emotions in virtual teaching situations, and reacting to emotional reactions.

In the last session, we tried to create a landscape of the topics of the workshop:

It was really a very good workshop, and we plan to follow up on this with a MATEL wiki, and a 2nd workshop at the next ECTEL conference.

Tags: ectel10
Posted in affective, conference, context, elearning, mature-ip, mirror, motivation, workplace learning | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

MATURE Project Coordination: Experiences from the 1st year

Monday, May 11th, 2009

It has been an exciting year, working as the scientific coordinator and (as Pablo Franzolini, the other part of the management team, likes to put it) the “moral authority” of the MATURE project. The team consists of more than 50 people from various background plus an additional group of associate partners of more than 30 organizations. This team is actually the best team I have ever experienced in a research project: highly motivated, creative, with renowned specialists in their field – and a team spirit. The coordination job does not become easy, but your effort becomes really rewarding. After 12 months, it is now time to reflect on it:

Openness and participation vs. managing complexity. For MATURE, we have chosen from the beginning a very open collaboration style with other initiatives. Mainly through our associate partner network, we have established contacts with various companies, research institutions and other initiatives. This gives you the opportunity to discuss your ideas with many different people and collect various constraints and requirements from their practical experience. You can also start joint activities that yield mutual benefit to increase impact and quality. However, such an approach is always at the edge regarding complexity. An Integrating Project with around 50 active participants is already a complex environment, but the open approach that complexity with different timelines, different goal structures etc., which have to be aligned.

Guidance according to the seeding-reseeding-evolutionary growth model. What is the role of a coordinator in such a project with high degrees of uncertainty? In “The Effective Executive” Drucker puts forward the main guiding question: “What contribution from me do you require to make your contribution?” So, a coordinator needs to act as a moderator of parallel strands of activities, giving guidance only where the lack of guidance would prevent people from making their contributions. Fischer’s SER model, which we have used for MATURE, seems to be a good model. It consists of three recurring phases in creative processes: seeding refers to given a group an initial starting point to start working on, evolutionary growth is the phase where the group develops their ideas without external intervention, and reseeding is an intervention in which the results of evolutionary growth are examined, pruned, and new input is provided to the group. We have used that paradigm both for the ethnographic study analysis, and especially for the use case development. In the latter case, groups of application and technical partners were asked to come up with use cases for technology support that improves knowledge maturing. The basis (=seeding) were the personas from the ethnographic studies and a framework for use case descriptions. After a phase of evolutionary growth, use cases were examined, clustered, merged and a refined description framework was given. The groups then worked on those use cases again. This has yielded very rich use cases and negotiated use cases (technically feasible, challenging from a research perspective, and based on needs of application partners).

Role of collective sensemaking. In previous projects, I have already learned how important collective sensemaking is for a project’s coherence and building a real team. Sensemaking here mainly refers to making sense (in the large) out of what we do (or have done) in smaller-scale situations. For the degrees of freedom and the level of uncertainty in research projects, top-down planning (the “master plan”) is simply not appropriate:

Top-down planning usually provokes the “following a plan” behavior, taking care of your own activities only, rather than caring for the project as a whole. People usually feel that something is wrong with the master plan, but are not subversive enough to challenge it.
Top-down planning does not adequately reflect the learning process within the project team. Plan revisions are usually slow and cumbersome so that you rather stick to the old plan.
Top-down planning avoids team discussions and decisions what is right or best by choosing something mediocre. Following a plan is way easier than having a planning framework within which you can and have to do your own planning in cooperation with others that are related to your activities.

A far better instrument than planning is the synchronization and coordination of activities through collective stories that bring together the individual pieces into a coherent whole. Such story building and collective sensemaking is a continuous process that is sufficiently agile to incorporate new insights and environmental changes, but ensures project coherence.

Tags: matureip
Posted in mature-ip, maturing, project management | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

Dave Snowden – and the ideas of MATURE

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

I just stumbled across Dave Snowden’s presentation at KM Asia 2008 in Singapore, and it was really surprising to see his three key principles of Social Computing, which ressemble a lot my vision for the MATURE project:

Distributed cognition

the wisdom and foolishness of crowds
top down stimulation of bottom up interaction
network capacity, but managed

This is exactly what we intend to achieve by stimulating bottom-up activity and redefine guidance. Take our example of people-tagging: we use the tagging behavior for getting clues what are hot topic areas (and some indicators on who might know what). But we do not simply stay there, but rather apply the gardening metaphor: we need a manager who understands himself as a gardener, fostering growth, but also pruning, and cleaning up, seeding etc.

Disintermediation

connecting decision makers with raw data
enable understanding, allow action
empowerment & visibility

So far this has not been that explicit for me, but that’s actually the mission of the guidance-related part of an Organizational Learning and Maturing Environment as we envision it: giving managers the opportunity to see and explore what’s going on. This way you avoid to depend on the analysis of someone else, increase the chance of serendipitous discovery.

Posted in km, mature-ip, maturing | Comments Off

« Older Entries

Search

Twitter Updates

Categories

Archive

Tags

Archive for the ‘mature-ip’ Category