Just stumbled upon one of Gartner’s predictions for strategic technologies in 2011. What is great to see is that context-aware computing as well as ubiquitous computing are becoming mainstream and is now considered to be the topic with high impact.

From a TechRepublic article:

The idea here is that social analytics and computing leads to knowledge about preferences. User interfaces would change based on context. Today, it’s all reactive. By 2011 to 2013, there will be more proactive alerts. By 2014 to 2018, you’ll have context integrated with enterprise systems. Ultimately, there will be a context platform. Portals, mashups, mobile, and social will combine. Vendors will offer “user experience platforms.”

Great to see that a favorite research topic of mine is now getting hyped.

But not only in the marketing-driven world, this is becoming a hot topic, we are also still working on the subject in exciting projects and initiatives, e.g., in the field of ambient assisted living (universAAL, openAAL), adaptive user interfaces for users with special needs (myUI), or supporting learning at the workplace (MIRROR). The key challenge here is not making systems context-aware, but actually detecting the context.

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).

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.

Finally, I have managed to complete the last step of my PhD (my defense was already in February): I have published the work. My thesis is titled “Situation-aware information services for work-integrated learning” (supervisors Prof. Peter Lockemann and Prof. Johannes Magenheim) and is available in German. It summarizes my research on context awareness and context management, and on supporting work-integrated learning (e.g., the knowledge maturing model, but also the methodology for context-steered learning) with competence ontologies. Yes, it has taken much too long, even the step from 98% to 100% has taken me one and a half years. But you should be aware that either you complete your PhD quickly, or you take care of a research department and several interesting projects – and do many other interesting things…

I am in the lucky situation that this is just the starting point for my further work. Within the MATURE project, I can continue my research on knowledge maturing and on competency-oriented approaches. Additionally, it has turned out that the context management approach is ideal also for the domain of ambient-assisted living (AAL), which has been shown in SOPRANO, and will continue in UniversAAL. Context-aware system behaviour in context of adaptive user interfaces has been the subject in AGENT-DYSL and will continue to be explored in the upcoming myUI.

Currently I am travelling to Brussels for the negotiations of two successful EU proposals in the area of eInclusion – with a 100% success rate Call 4 of FP7 was a very efficient call Both proposals provide the opportunity to explore new paths in my second main stream of research: context-awareness. While I have started in the domain of technology-enhanced learning, the ambient-assisted living project SOPRANO has shown that the results (particularly the blackboard-based approach to context management, which allows for a combination of ontology-based techniques with statistical approaches and provides native support for uncertainty and the temporal dimension) can be easily transferred to ambient technologies. Also adaptive user interfaces are in need of a flexible context management system, as our first attempt in AGENT-DYSL has shown, which was aiming at adaptive reading support for children with dyslexia.

• In the upcoming AAL project universAAL (an Integrating Project – IP) we aim to develop our SOPRANO Ambient middleware (soon to be release as openAAL – an open source middleware for ambient assisted living) to become part of a reference architecture and open source implementation of a universal AAL infrastructure, together with a promising consortium of 18 partners.
• Within myUI (a STREP), we aim at “synergistic user modeling”, i.e., device-independent capturing of the user’s context so that we can more easily engineer adaptive user interfaces for various devices, particularly for users with special needs, like the elderly, but also others.

I am already looking forward to those projects, which will probably start in the first quarter 2010, although this will again mean an increased number of travels (which I could successfully reduce in 2009).

Last week we had the very successful second annual review of the Integrated Project SOPRANO in the field of Ambient Assisted Living. Our approach to a semantic middleware based on OSGi has been highly appreciated. At the core is on the one side a context management approach, which is largely based on my PhD work and has been developed further by my colleague Peter Wolf, on the other side the semantic service description approach from DIANE, which Michael Klein from CAS has developed. Our lightweight semantics approach on both sides plays very well together, as the following presentation shows:

We want plan to make this technology available to everyone. Stay tuned.

Finally, the book edited by Claus Pahl appeared: Architecture Solutions for E-Learning Systems where I contributed a chapter on the Impact of Context-Awareness on the Architecture of E-Learning Solutions (Bibsonomy-Entry).

Recently, the situatedness of learning has come to the center of attention in both research and practice, also a result of the insight that traditional learning methods in the form of large decontextualized courses lead to inert knowledge; i.e., knowledge that can be reproduced, but not applied to real-world problem solving. In order to avoid the inertness, pedagogy tries to set up authentic learning settings, an approach increasingly shared in e-learning domain. If we consider professional training, it is the immediacy of purpose and context that makes it largely different to learning in schools or academic education. This immediacy has the benefit that we actually have an authentic context that we need to preserve. The majority of current e-learning approaches, however, ignores this context and provides decontextualized forms of learning as a multimedia copy of traditional presence seminars. We show how making learning solutions aware of the context actually affects their architecture and present a showcase solution in the form of the Learning in Process service-oriented architecture.

Recently, I have completed two book chapters that fairly comprehensively summarize the results of my research on how to support workplace learning with the notion of context awareness:

• The first focuses on the ontology-based modeling and overall methodological approach. It is placed within the context of Semantic Work Environments.
  Enabling Leaning on Demand in Semantic Work Environments, to appear in Rech, Decker, Ras (eds.): Emerging Technologies for Semantic Work Environments: Techniques, Methods, and Applications, IGI Publishing, 2008
• The second focuses on the architectural issues related to introducing context awareness into e-learning solutions. It describes my service-oriented approach, which is based on a ontology-centered design methodology for deriving services and ensuring their coherence.
  Impact of Context-Awareness on the Architecture of E-Learning Solutions, to appear in Pahl (ed.): Architecture Solutions for E-Learning Systems, IGI Publishing, 2007

Within the SOPRANO project, we were working on compiling a comprehensive and interdisciplinary compilation and assessment of the state of the art in the domains relevant to creating an ambient assisted living system. It encompasses as diverse topics as Assistive Technologies, Smart Homes, Sensors, RFID, Radar Technologies, Software Architectures, Ontologies, and Context Modeling and Management. I was mainly contributing to the sections on ontologies and context modeling & management. The document is available from here.

Andreas Schmidt:
Ontology-based User Context Management: The Challenges of Dynamics and Imperfection
In: Proceedings of International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of SEmantics (ODBASE 2006), On the Move Federated Conferences (OTM), Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 4275, 2006, pp. 995-1011
PDF
Abstract: Robust and scalable user context management is the key enabler for the emerging context- and situation-aware applications, and ontology-based approaches have shown their usefulness for capturing especially context information on a high level of abstraction. But so far the problem has not been approached as a data management problem, which is key to scalability and robustness. The specific challenges lie in the imperfection of high-level context information, its time-dependence and the variability in the dynamics between its different elements. The approach presented in this paper presents a layered data model which structures the problems and is geared towards flexible and efficient query processing in combination of relational database and logic-based techniques. The techniques have been successfully applied for context-aware corporate learning support.

Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt:
Socially-Aware Informal Learning Support: Potentials and Challenges of the Social Dimension
In: Proceedings of the Joint International Workshop on Professional Learning, Competence Development and Knowledge Management, in conjunction with the First European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ECTEL 06), Heraklion, 2006
PDF
Abstract: With increasingly conceiving learning as a social activity, technological support must become more aware of the social context of the individual in order to be able to provide adequate support. But many issues related to making systems socially aware are subject to ongoing research, e.g., the description of social relationship, mining social relationships, and especially privacy preservation. This paper wants to give a brief overview which possibilities social awareness can offer, and to present a research agenda for realizing these potentials.