My MATURE Project blogIn the middle of weeks of heavy travelling, I am currently at Ohrid for the PROLEARN/EATEL Summer School. Pablo and I had the opportunity to open the summer school with the first lecture on Knowledge Maturing: a different perspective on learning where we explained the main conceptual foundations of the MATURE IP.
Rethinking learning in enterprises in response to bottom-up participatory approaches is one of the main themes of the MATURE IP. So together with my colleague Simone Braun (FZI), Graham Attwell (Pontydysgu), Eric Ras (Fraunhofer IESE), Stefanie Lindstaedt (Know-Center), and Ronald Maier (University of Innsbruck) we are organizing a workshop at this year’s ECTEL conference in Maastricht on that subject: Learning in Enterprise 2.0 and Beyond.
Recently, we have seen a paradigm shift in technology support for learning towards more participatory approaches in which learners are seen as active contributors. Within enterprises, this new perspective brings together traditionally separated disciplines like e-learning, knowledge management, and human resources development, but also requires a fundamental change of the culture of the respective enterprise towards an enterprise 2.0, which is characterized by enhanced collaboration and a cultural of employee participation. The enterprise 2.0 needs to understand itself as a learning organization, needs to leverage bottom-up processes (from the employee towards the organization) and aim at closed-loop approaches where feedback, continuous improvement, and encouraging small and large-scale innovations at all levels is key.
In this workshop, we aim at exploring new ways of technology-enhanced learning within an enterprise on the way to enterprise 2.0, and the role of learning technology in the transformation process. This includes the exploration of individual perspectives in the form of personal learning environments (in contrast to traditional LMS or VLE), the community perspective, and the organizational perspective (new forms of guidance, e.g., as part of competence management strategies). There is a tension between these different perspectives, which has a huge impact on the success of learning technologies in the enterprise. Therefore, we are also looking for conceptual approaches addressing these issues.
One important aspect in this respect is the consideration of motivational factors affecting the engagement in learning activities and the contribution towards organizational goals: how can we leverage the intrinsic motivation of employees and create learning contexts that keep this motivation alive? What is the effect of social relationships?
An essential part of the workshop will be the interaction of the participants, aiming at a better definition/characterization of enterprise 2.0 and the implications for future research approaches. This will be facilitated by a larger discussion slot which will be moderated and guided by lead questions.
Topics include empirical, conceptual, and technical approaches in the following areas:
The workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners concerned with learning in enterprises including includes researchers from different backgrounds like information technology, (vocational) pedagogy, psychology, and multiple fields of expertise like e-learning, knowledge management, human resources, among others.
Andreas Schmidt, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany [main contact, email: aschmidt@fzi.de]
Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, UK
Simone Braun, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Ronald Maier, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Eric Ras, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
Alan Brown, University of Warwick, UK
John Cook, London Metropolitan University, UK
Knut Hinkelmann, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland
Helen Keegan, University of Salford, UK
Barbara Kieslinger, ZSI, Austria (TBC)
Christine Kunzmann, Kompetenzorientierte Personalentwicklung, Germany
Tobias Ley, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Johannes Magenheim, University of Paderborn, Germany
Torsten Leidig, SAP, Germany (TBC)
Jeanne Mengis, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Andrew Ravenscroft, London Metropolitan University, UK
Uwe Riss, SAP, Germany (TBC)
Luk Vervenne, Synergetics, Belgium
Amir Winer, Center for Futurism in Education, Ben-Gurion-University of the Negev, Israel
Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
Volker Zimmermann, IMC, Germany
Judging from my inbox (more than 1.200 incoming and 700 outgoing mails), the project must have started quite some time ago, but it is actually only tomorrow that the MATURE IP is going to start. The preparation of the kick-off meeting at Karlsruhe has been a lot of work in which I was supported a lot by my colleague Simone Braun, but I’m now really looking forward to the next three days – the team spirit was already incredible at proposal stage. MATURE is about exciting topics, and I have received a lot of positive feedback on the ideas and approach we have at various occasions. So let’s start to make the ideas reality!
From FZI, we have issued a press release both in German and English, and you can find together with high resolution logo files under http://mature-ip.eu/press:
… MATURE builds on the lessons of the failures of organisation-driven approaches to technology-enhanced learning and the success of community-driven approaches in the spirit of Web 2.0. MATURE leverages the intrinsic motivation of employees to engage in collaborative learning activities, and aims at combining it with a new technology-enhanced form of organisational guidance. For that purpose, MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical (learning) content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves knowledge about tasks and processes or semantic structures (including competence models). The goal of MATURE is to better understand this maturing process, based on a series of empirical studies, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers. …
Graham Attwell (with whom I will work together in the context of the MATURE IP) has prepared a nice introductory slidecast on the new (?) understanding of learning that forms the foundation of my knowledge maturing perspective on learning in organizations and the role of Personal Learning Environments.
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.
Eventually, it seems to have been worth all the these late evening phone conferences, weekend work sessions, and vacation interruptions… The MATURE IP proposal, which kept me busy in spring (and June for the hearing preparation), had a very successful evaluation (14.5 out of 15 points) in Call 1 of FP7 and (as one of two IPs in the Technology-Enhanced Learning area) officially entered contract negotiations with the EC.
The project is a large-scale continuation of our knowledge maturing research and concentrates on improving maturing of content, semantic structures and processes with the help of a personal learning & maturing environment and a corresponding organizational learning & maturing environment. It brings together an impressive team of excellent and highly motivated people I have always wanted to work with (like Stefanie Lindstaedt & Tobias Ley, Uwe Riss, Knut Hinkelmann, Ronald Maier, and Graham Attwell) or already successfully worked with in projects (like Pablo Franzolini and John Cook). I am really looking forward to coordinating the project.
A very preliminary website for the Integrating Project has been established under mature-ip.eu, but this will be improved soon. Likely project start will be in spring 2008.
Tags: MatureIP
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