My MATURE Project blogThe 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:
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).
Contact information