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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yesterday, I was at this year’s edition of the AKWM Symposion, which is the yearly event of the Karlsruhe working group on knowledge management. The organizers always manage to find interesting speakers and presenters, among them the following:

Wim Veen from TU Delft opened the day with his insights around the Homo Zappiens and highlighted the radical shifts difference in media exposure, consumption, and perception of children of the digital  age. In contrast to others, he viewed this change not as generally bad, but rather emphasized that multi-player games like World of Warcraft let’s children learn social collaboration behavior, and that parallel usage of different channels help to form the important skill of multitasking. He suggested that as parents and educators we should be less worried about the usage of computers, mobile phones, and other media devices, but rather immerse into those new environments to understand them better and to be able to provide guidance.

Gabi Reinmann from University of Augsburg presented conceptual foundations for personal knowledge management based on her book “Wissenswege” (paths of/toward knowledge), which could be interesting to incorporate into the MATURE discussion on Personal Learning Environments  At the end of her talk she presented results from two studies on knowledge bloggers (researchers and teachers), whose emotional/motivational aspects could be crucial for the notion of PLEs, too: experience of competence, social integration, and autonomy. Particularly the latter one could be a challenges and source of conflict for PLEs within organizations – one example in the discussion mentioned that external blogging platforms are preferred over corporate blogging platforms because of the aspect of autonomy.

Manfred Spitzer from the University Hospital Ulm gave a very inspiring talk on the neuropsychological insights of learning. Apart from the entertaining style of presentation, he was also able to communicate the key findings of neuropsychological research in recent years, e.g.,

• the role of positive and negative emotions on learning effects: learning based on negative emotions (particularly fear) is very quick, but blocks any form of creativity; positive emotions can boost learning outcomes as it increases neural activity
• the differences between children and adults: while learning can be very quick in childhood, adult learning is slower – which does not mean that one is better than the other

Additionally, he had a very strong opinion on how the education system should look like and that modern media (like TV, but also computers) have a bad impact on the development of children. He suggested to expose children to the Internet after the age of 17, opposed the – it would have been interesting to have a panel discussion with Wim Veen. After all, I don’t think that there is any radical answer to the challenges of the digital age, neither protection against, nor uncriticial embracing of the “digital native” phenomenon. But another suggestion from him is definitely a good idea: evidence-based education and conducting more empirical educational research on the effectiveness of pedagogical concepts and methods.

He has a similarly strong opinion on the use of Powerpoint (he opposed the fact that children at school are forced to use Powerpoint for their slides) – and cited the NASA Columbia accident assessment where Powerpoint-based communication was considered one of the causes. Well, probably he was one of the example that very good presenters do not need Powerpoint slides at all, but I would argue that the use of slides makes helps average and less-than-average presenters.

As a replacement for Franz Reinisch, I had the opportunity to present MATURE as one of the key activities in the knowledge management field of the iRegion Karlsruhe. The presentation particularly highlighted the potential of the knowledge maturing approach to overcome the separation of knowledge management and learning.

Hans-Peter Schnurr from Ontoprise and Prof. Rudi Studer from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and FZI moderated the session and gave an overview of the cluster initiative iRegion, aimed at fostering the IT cluster Karlsruhe (which is among the top 3 in Europe).

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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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.

In October and November, I will present Christine Kunzmann‘s and my approach to competency-oriented human resource development to different audiences:

• We were invited to present our ontology-driven approach to the HR-XML community at the Human Capital and Social Innovation Summit 2007 in Maastricht on October 17, 2007. There is a special session (organized by the Ontology Outreach Advisory), exploring the potential of semantics and competency frameworks for the future evolution of HR-XML. My talk will especially focus on competency relationships.
• At the eChallenges 2007 in Den Haag (October 24-26), I will present the approach under the special focus of sustainability (see our paper on Sustainable Competency-Oriented Human Resource Development): how can approaches based on competency ontologies actually be maintained over time. The ideas presented there are a precursor to the research in the MATURE IP.
• Christine and I were also invited to present an overview of the paradigm of competency-oriented human resource development at the Professional Training Facts 2007 on November 13 at Stuttgart. At the same event, my colleague Simone Braun was also invited to give a talk on social issues in informal learning support.

Although this will mean a lot of traveling, I am looking forward to talk with different communities, get feedback on our work, possibilities to apply them in different companies, and fresh ideas on how to continue our research.