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.

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.

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.

In 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.

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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

Topics include empirical, conceptual, and technical approaches in the following areas:

• Designing personal learning environments
  • Learner as consumer and producer and learner empowerment
  • Relevant tools, services, and architectures
  • Bottom-up approaches for work-integrated learning
  • Connecting knowledge assets, e.g. with mashups, semantic structures
• Exploring the tension between individual and organizational perspectives on learning
  • Scaffolding and guidance of individual learning processes towards organizational goals (business or competence development goals)
  • Exploring the transitions between individual, community, and organizational learning
  • Learning in distributed communities of practice and collaboration between different enterprises
  • Approaches bridging knowledge management, e-learning, and human resources perspectives
  • Employability, role of different types of e-portfolios
  • Collaborative and participatory competence management
  • Novel educational approaches and learning theories on technology-enhanced individual and organizational learning
• Motivational and social aspects
  • Motivational and social barriers to informal learning
  • Designing learning environments to leverage intrinsic motivation
  • Awareness of social relationships

Target Group

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.

Submission Types

• Research papers (up to 10 pages)
• Position papers (up to 5 pages)
• Experience reports (short up to 5 pages, long up to 10 pages)

Organization Commitee

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

Programme Commitee

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

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.

The last two days I was at the Professional Training Facts 2007 to present the joint work between me and Christine Kunzmann on Competency-Oriented Human Resource Development as well as a talk by colleague Simone Braun on social aspects in informal learning.

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 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:

• Finally, the disciplines of e-learning and knowledge management are approaching one another. Gabi Reinmann clearly pointed out, however, that we should not easily sweep away the differences of the environmental context (in formal educational settings vs. at the workplace). Although this was controversial in the discussion, I think that it was an important contribution to the discussion. Klaus Tochtermann presented the APOSDLE approach about work-integrated learning which is further developing and realizing ideas that can be seen as a continuation of what we pursued within the LIP project.
• With the advent of social software, the constructivist pedagogy really gains ground in practice. Several examples on the use of Wikis and Weblogs were shown. It has also become clear, however, that we students and employees need to be educated on how to learn with such tools and within such settings: we need people with competencies to develop their competencies in interaction with others.
• In the future, we need to have a closer look at the findings of cognitive science. There were some interesting ideas by Hanna Risku, but also phenomena like “flow” and other motivational issues have come up here and there: we need intrinsically motivated learners and workers everywhere. Götz Werner provided the metaphor of “burning” for this.
• There were also some interesting talks with practitioners from companies: there really is the need for maturing pathways that bring together bottom-up and top-down approaches (as we postulated within out knowledge maturing research).

Right after the I-KNOW conference, I attended the Kick-Off meeting of the AGENT-DYSL project, which is about Accommodative Intelligent Educational Environments for Dyslexic Learners and is funded by the European Commission within the eInclusion call (where AGENT-DYSL was ranked no. 1). The project is concerned with the development of new technologies and tools for the support of pupils with dyslexia (5-10% of all pupils suffer from dyslexia). Existing reading assistance software solutions lack important adaptive functions. The projects aims to integrate state-of-the-art technologies from the Semantic Web, speech and image processing in order to support user modeling (covering learning progress and emotional state) and adaptive user interfaces.

Our role in the project is the user context modeling and management as well as knowledge representation (especially for adaptation rules).