Andreas.Schmidt's blog

People Tagging Tool / SOBOLEO release as open source

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:55:19 +0000

The people tagging tool, which is based on the SOBOLEO framework, has been released as open source under GPLv3. We offer hosting, development, and consulting services that facilitate the customization and opereration of the system at the workplace.

The source code as well as a convenient installer that creates customized packages is available from our new site under http://knowledge-maturing.com/services-and-tools/tools/people-tagging

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Simone Braun

"A refreshing new perspective on learning": MATURE raises interest at Learntec 2012

Andreas.Schmidt — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:09:12 +0000

Learntec 2012 was a surprising success for MATURE. Both the knowledge maturing model and the tools, especially the people tagging solution, has attracted considerable interest by fair visitors. MATURE has been able to show well-grounded and practically relevant approaches to knowledge management and learning that set a refreshing antipole to many products and services offered by other exhibitors: while these solutions often appear to be stuck in the last decade, the discussions and reactions from visitors have shown that MATURE has been able to incorporate the lessons learnt from previous approaches.

The knowledge maturing model has proven its potential to quickly involve people in thorough reflections about knowledge and learning. Particularly consultants were interested in cooperations to apply it in their projects. It is seen as a communication instrument that can also bring about changes in attitude of customers towards more holistic, more participatory forms of learning support. Learntec 2012 was also to announce the knowledge-maturing.com platform that presents the solutions and offerings resulting from four years of MATURE research to a wider audience.

SOBOLEO was interesting as a lightweight alternative to intranet approaches for several international software companies. Follow-up activities will explore the possibilities to integrate it into their approaches.

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Pontydysgu

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Christine Kunzmann

Graham Attwell

Nicolas Weber

Simone Braun

knowledge-maturing.com launched for releasing MATURE results

Andreas.Schmidt — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:40:34 +0000

Right for the LearnTec 2012, we have launched the first version of our knowledge-maturing.com web site that presents the offerings of our project to interested companies and other organizations. It shows our offering in terms of technology solutions (most of which are or will be available as open source), consulting approaches and training offerings as well as publications for the scientific community.

We have not yet been able to include the whole wealth of material and offerings, but will continue to augment the site during the next weeks.

New Flyer on Knowledge Maturing Model

Andreas.Schmidt — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:01:13 +0000

Two journal articles accepted

Andreas.Schmidt — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:53:51 +0000

Recently, two journal articles have been accepted after a lengthy reviewing process. They summarize two major areas of contribution of MATURE: iterative and agile design processes/design-based research and agile competence management and ontology maturing.

Simone Braun, Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt
Semantic People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: An Enterprise Social Media Approach to Competence Management
International Journal on Knowledge and Learning

Semantic People Tagging is an Enterprise 2.0-style approach to making expertise and individual capabilities transparent. By combining it with a collaborative ontology editor and thus the possibility to construct a shared vocabulary and understanding, it can be a supplement for cumbersome competence management, or expert finder solutions, which lack acceptance among employees, and suffer from outdated data. It gives human resources a timely overview of available and required competencies based on peer reviews and actual usage. However, it also needs to be tailored to the cultural characteristics of a specific company. Therefore, we have developed a design framework for semantic people tagging.

We want to present the general approach based on the ontology maturing concept of gradual formalization and its implementation based on a social semantic bookmarking system. Focus group interviews with HR experts have further have yielded insights into the wider context and validated the concept. The system has been introduced and evaluated at a company for career advising, and is being rolled out to additional contexts.

Andrew Ravenscoft, Andreas Schmidt, John Cook, Claire Bradley
Designing Socio-technical Systems for Informal Learning and Knowledge Maturing in the ‘Web 2.0 Workplace’
Journal of Computer Assisted Learning

This article presents an original approach to designing socio-technical technology enhanced learning (TEL) to realise informal learning and knowledge maturing. It is being conducted as part of a large-scale EC project called MATURE. In addressing the challenge of designing work integrated TEL systems within the „Web 2.0 workplace‟, we have developed and tested an agile and „federated‟ approach to the design of social and semantic technologies. This has followed an original design based research approach that has been adapted to conform with a new framework of deep learning design. Two design cycles are reported that incorporated: early technical and conceptual „design studies‟; Use Cases of envisaged scenarios; Demonstrator prototypes that synthesise the technical and user requirements; and, a flexible Evaluation Framework that coordinates and assesses the related activities. In this article we will present this design approach and describe the socio-technical systems that it has produced along with their formative evaluation. Finally, we offer some conclusions about designing socio-technical systems for the work-place of the future.

Contact me if you are interested.

STELLAR Roundtable on Social Mobile Networking for Informal Learning (SoMobNet)

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 19:12:48 +0000

MATURE contributed to the STELLAR (The European Network of Excellence in TEL) Theme Team on “Social Mobile Networking for Informal Learning” (SoMobNet) International Roundtable at the Institute of Education in London on 21st November 2011. Both John Cook and Graham Attwell presented results from the MATURE demonstrators.

Graham Attwell: Using Mobiles for Networked Learning and Knowledge Sharing for Careers Information, Advice and Guidance

Online People Tagging: Social Mobile Networking Services in Work-based Learning

Persons:

Graham Attwell

John Cook

Knowledge Maturing for Organizational Development: A Workshop with IFIP

Andreas.Schmidt — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:14:53 +0000

MATURE organized a joint workshop together with the IFIP AGORA initiative to explore the potential of applying the knowledge maturing model landscape to organizational development problems.

The International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) is a world wide acting umbrella organization to the National Societies of Computer Science. IFIP is associated to UNESCO and is also part of the Associated Partner Network of MATURE. IFIP’s president Leon Strous, who emphatically invited the representatives of the different technical committees of IFIP to participate in the workshop, stressed that there is a growing need for collaboration between the various IFIP groups and with international acting partners (international bodies and institutions, industry and business, key decision makers, member societies). In order to accommodate such collaboration, TC-3 of IFIP launched the AGORA initiative that aimed to implement a dynamic methodology for initiating cooperative projects for individual competence development in conjunction with Lifelong Learning.

Together with MATURE the workshop in Barcelona should support those goals. Furthermore, the workshop should contribute to a process of evolutionary change inside IFIP in order to improve the cooperation between the TCs and to generate synergy of action especially with regard to transversal themes of the information and knowledge society, that are not just technology based. Examples are besides Lifelong Learning e.g. the themes of Security and Trust, E-Governance and Ethics that have been also discussed at the Summits on the Information Society during the last years.

During the workshop members of the MATURE consortium presented the results of their research on knowledge maturing and related IT-Software-Tools, developed so far. In detail

Based on the results of three years of empirical research efforts (ethnographic study, representative study, in depth study) with hundreds of European and globally acting companies from different economic sectors, an analysis of real-world maturing practices, and derived knowledge maturing services were presented.
The presented results were consolidated in a sound general conceptual model of knowledge maturing (the so-called knowledge maturing model landscape), which consists of the identification of phases of knowledge maturing and its characteristics, indicators for observing knowledge maturing, identification of key knowledge maturing and guidance activities to be supported by tools, and motivational and social barriers and ways to overcome them.
A widget-based, Web 2.0 inspired Learning & Maturing Environment, integrating personal and organizational perspectives (PLME /OLME), embedded into the working environment of application partners was also presented and their functionalities were discussed.

In plenary and break-out sessions during the workshop the participants discussed the possible impact of the conceptual findings and the technical developments of the MATURE project on AGORA’s future work and the organizational cooperation within IFIP. Participating members of IFIP presented and discussed academic and professional fields where transversal initiatives could create new possibilities of knowledge maturing and activities that enhances efficient ways of working within the framework of IFIP.

Besides the attendees of MATURE, IFIP participants from Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Poland and Switzerland, representing different TCs, were attending the workshop.

Organizations:

CIMNE

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

TU Graz

University of Innsbruck

University of Paderborn

Persons:

Alexander Sandow

Andreas Kaschig

Andreas Schmidt

Barbara Kump

Christine Kunzmann

Johannes Magenheim

Pablo Franzolini

Tobias Nelkner

MATURE at WikiSym 2011

Andreas.Schmidt — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:32:09 +0000

The success of wikis depends very strongly on the user participation and the willingness to edit. Athanasios Mazarakis and Clemens van Dinther from MATURE presented results at the WikiSym conference in San Francisco how to foster participation with feedback mechanisms. WikiSym is the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies for researchers, industry, entrepreneurs and practitioners worldwide.

The results about the feedback mechanisms have been collected in field experiments about course wikis. With different experimental treatments it was possible to show that:

Feedback can help to prioritize to knowledge maturing activities
Foster participation in wikis
A social ranking can even more help to raise awareness for knowledge exchange

Contacts to the Wikimedia Foundation have been established as these result seem promising as well for the Wikipedia project.

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Persons:

Athanasios Mazarakis

MATURE and competence development: Professional Training Facts 2011

Andreas.Schmidt — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:28:32 +0000

MATURE has once again been invited to this year's Professional Training Facts 2011. Christine Kunzmann has organized a session on Motivational and Affective Aspects in Competence Development in joint initiative with the MIRROR project. In this session, Verónica Rivera Pelayo presented approaches to capturing affective state from the MIRROR project, associate partner Josef Hofer-Alfeis presents his experiences on employee motivation, and Christine Kunzmann presented conclusions from the research in MIRROR and MATURE.

Andreas Schmidt: The Role of Motivational & Affective Aspects: Introduction
Josef Hofer-Alfeiss: Improving Employee Motivation and Innovation Performance
Verónica Rivera Pelayo: Personal Informatics for Capturing Emotions
Christine Kunzmann: The Role of Motivational & Affective Aspects: Empirical Results and Future Directions

Furthermore Graham Attwell gave an inspiring talk on Mobile Learning: Using Mobiles for Learning, Developing and Sharing Knowledge

During the breaks, the MATURE team discussed with participants of the event at the booth and gave explanations on MATURE results and possibilities for future collaboration.

Organizations:

Dr.-Ing. Josef Hofer-Alfeis

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Pontydysgu

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Christine Kunzmann

Graham Attwell

2nd Workshop on Motivational and Affective Aspects in TEL

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:49:49 +0000

In a joint activity with the MIRROR and the IntelLEO projects, MATURE has organized a second edition of the MATEL workshop at this year's ECTEL 2011 in Palermo, Italy.

Based on results from these projects and a discussion with the workshop participants, the following research challenges were identified:

Future research should not aim at general "motivational" or "affective aspects", but should explore them in a concrete context. Workshop participants were rather sceptical whether a general framework could be established that could form the basis of systematic motivational design approach ("motivational design models").
A lot of potential was seen in the analysis of concrete existing systems and their appropriation. Especially the comparison - or even interaction - of challenge-based and goal-driven systems could lead to new insights.
While motivation has so far mainly been analyzed on an individual level, it would be promising to research the group-level and whether we need completely different concepts on that level. That includes also aspects of scaling.
Furthermore, it could be very helpful to systematically identify user roles/user types and their characteristics with respect to motivational and affective aspects.

The papers and a more extensive summary can be found on the workshop page: http://matel.professional-learning.eu/index.php/2nd_MATEL_Workshop_at_European_Conference_for_Technology_Enhanced_Learning_(ECTEL_2011)

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Christine Kunzmann

Careers Talk - a new web site for career guidance published

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:38:09 +0000

As a result of the work conducted within MATURE, Pontydysgu and the Institute for Employment Research, Warwick University, announce a new web site (CareersTalk), providing access to the ongoing research and development into careers guidance and in particular, the use of new technology to support careers guidance. Much of this work has been also supported by the G8WAY project.

“The web site is designed to provide leading-edge ideas for careers work – including information-advice-and-guidance, careers education, career counselling, mentoring, coaching, personal-and-social development, learning for well-being, for a changing world, portfolio development and individual action-planning. In particular it focuses on the use of technology for careers information, advice and guidance. Technology has already influenced, and will continue to influence, not only the ways in which guidance services are accessed by clients, but how they are used by them.”

The web site also provides links to working versions of our data visualisation tools.

Organizations:

Pontydysgu

University of Warwick

Persons:

Alan Brown

Graham Attwell

Jenny Bimrose

Sally-Anne Barnes

Associate Partner Event for the Careers Sector at Warwick

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 20:16:29 +0000

On September 29, 2011, MATURE has invited career guidance decision makers, researchers, and practitioners to Warwick, UK for an interactive demonstration of MATURE tools. Almost 50 participants discussed with the MATURE team on the usefulness and potential of the people tagging demonstrator, the widget-based environment for developing and sharing LMI related content, the LMI visualization tool, and learning and development modules. The participants have been very interested in using the tools, and as part of the plenary discussion, many interesting ideas for further development have come up that the MATURE team will explore further.

The slides and additional material are available from http://mature-ip.eu/event/warwick2011

Organizations:

Connexions Northumberland

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Pontydysgu

TU Graz

University of Paderborn

University of Warwick

Persons:

Alan Brown

Andreas Schmidt

Barbara Kump

Christine Kunzmann

Graham Attwell

Jenny Bimrose

Sally-Anne Barnes

Workshop on Motivational and Cultural Barriers to Knowledge Sharing at M&C 2011

Andreas.Schmidt — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Together with the Institute for Software Technology at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, Germany and Joanneum Research in Graz, Austria, MATURE organized a workshop at the Mensch & Computer conference 2011 in Chemnitz, Germany.

The main goal of the workshop was to identify challenges and opportunities of motivational and cultural barriers for Enterprise 2.0 settings. At the end of the day the participants created a Social Software Guideline for the introduction and implementation of social software in organizational settings. Some of the points of this guideline are outlined below:

Efficient communication as a goal of Enterprise 2.0 can lead to significant benefits regarding to avoid information overload and thus leading to less frustration
Efficient knowledge transfer can help to connect experts and therefore help to let the knowledge and information be spread more easily among the interested individuals. This can support in terms of optimization the team building process and the identification of critical resources e.g. at the beginning of a project.
Participation of employees can help to foster communication and build an innovation-friendly organizational culture to raise autonomy and competence, besides awareness and transparency

A complete coverage of the workshop (in German) can be found at the workshop web site.

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Persons:

Athanasios Mazarakis

Very successful 3rd Annual Review Meeting

Andreas.Schmidt — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:11:01 +0000

Last week, the project team, the expert reviewers and the project officer were in Innsbruck to assess the outcome of the third year of MATURE and to give guidance on the fourth and final year of MATURE. We had long and very interesting and constructive discussions, and we are happy that the review panel thinks that we have continued to make excellent progress, particularly by a sustained and successful agile approach to project management (which is not seen frequently in EU projects). The knowledge maturing model landscape is seen as unique in the field of knowledge management and workplace learning, and MATURE has the potential to become the benchmark project in the field.

We will soon publish the year 3 deliverables, and further activities are upcoming, such as associate partner meetings, workshops at various conferences etc. Stay tuned...

Workshop on Motivational, Social, and Cultural Aspects of Knowledge Management

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:34:08 +0000

The MATURE team organized an exciting workshop on Motivational, Social, and Cultural Aspects of knowledge management at this year's Professional Knowledge Management conference in Innsbruck.

The goal of this workshop was to bring together the various disciplines that explore the "human factor" of knowlegde management, ranging from psychology, via CSCW to Human Resource Management, among others.

Christine Kunzmann moderated the workshop with 20-30 participants.

Andreas Schmidt introduced into the workshop topic and presented results from the empirical study in the MATURE project. This introduction triggered an interesting discussion on completely different understanding of leadership in the age of knowledge workers, e.g., with respect to autonomy.

Motivationale, soziale und kulturelle Faktoren im Wissensmanagement

Ingo Bildstein then presented his contribution on "A Proposal for a New Framework for a Great Place to Work: A Socio-Cognitive View on Knowledge Work Motivation". This particularly stirred discussion about the "dark side of knowledge management".

The workshop block on motivation was continued with a presentation of Stefan Thaler on "SpotTheLink: Playful Alignment of Ontologies", which resulted in a discussion on the role of games and game mechanisms for knowledge management in companies. While it became clear that the contribution is a good example for crowdsourcing tedious tasks, it was less obvious how games could play a role beyond their use in training. Game mechanisms were more seen in ambivalent way, e.g., competition can have positive, but also quite negative effects.

In the afternoon, the workshop continued with a contribution from Julia Müller on Elements of an Interactive Knowledge Culture, which was based on empirical research. This was followed by an experience report from René Peinl on applying the knowledge maturing model in Sharepoint projects. This started a discussion on the knowledge maturing model and its role for determining appropriate tools.

After the talk from Christiane Zehrer on the introduction of social media, with particularly focus on cross-cultural experiences in a team in Japan, the workshop concluded with a challenging discussion on how to move forward from here. We discussed open issues in the field. The current state of the art appeared to be not mature yet as there is little generalizable knowledge. Some ideas were brought up on bridging the gap between model-level variables and observable indicators, but there was doubt that this is feasible.

It is planned to continue the formation of a community around those subjects, and we are looking forward to the next editions of this workshop series.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Athanasios Mazarakis

Christine Kunzmann

talkIT Workshop on Entrepreneurial Knowledge Management

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:13:13 +0000

Organized by the Tyrolean "Standortagentur" and hosted by Ronald Maier at the University of Innsbruck, the talkIT workshop centered around the topic of entrepreneurial knowledge management and how it affects the competencies required by IT employees.

Andreas Schmidt presented his perspective on the new role of IT in knowledge management based on the knowledge maturing approach, which require much more interdisciplinary competencies for understanding the application domain and for bridging between the different perspectives in an enterpise. Moreover, he stressed that the new generation of knowledge management requires much more participatory approaches - and less hierarchy.

Christoph Holz from Holzweg also emphasized in his talk the new understanding of leadership, which is based on a much more optimistic and trustful idea of man than previous understandings of leadership. He presented his own company as an example how such leadership can work.

The workshop concluded with a lively discussion on these new ideas.

Here are the German slides

Verstehen, einbinden, verändern - Wissensreifungsprozesse gestalten

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Ronald Maier

MATURE @ Professional Knowledge Management Conference

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:09:40 +0000

Beginning of this week, the biennial knowledge management conference WM 2011 took place in Innsbruck, Austria, organized by Ronald Maier and his team. It provided a great opportunity to discuss about MATURE concepts and solutions with experts in the field and practitioners from industry, both large companies and SMEs. Among them were also several associate partners of MATURE's network. MATURE's stand provided a forum for this, and the whole MATURE team among the participants of the conference took a chance for informing and discussing during the coffee and lunch breaks.

The MATURE team also contributed to the conference with keynotes at the talkIT workshop (Andreas Schmidt), a tutorial on enterprise modelling (Knut Hinkelmann), the organization of the MSKWM workshop (Christine Kunzmann, Athanasios Mazarakis, Andreas Schmidt) and a contribution in the E20SUCCESS workshop (Nicolas Weber).

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

University of Innsbruck

Persons:

Alexander Sandow

Andreas Kaschig

Andreas Schmidt

Athanasios Mazarakis

Christine Kunzmann

Knut Hinkelmann

Michael Kohlegger

Nicolas Weber

Ronald Maier

Two new MATURE posters available on Knowledge Maturing models and tool landscape

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 08:49:21 +0000

For the upcoming conference in Innsbruck on Professional Knowledge Management, we have prepared two new posters that explain the knowledge maturing model and the tool landscape.

MATURE IP: Knowledge Maturing Model

MATURE IP: Knowledge Maturing Tools

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

MATURE @ Professional Training Facts 2010: Learning, Competence, Performance

Andreas.Schmidt — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:52:08 +0000

MATURE has presented the project results at the exhibition area of this year's Professional Training Facts 2010 and could establish contacts to various participants from industry.

Additionally, Christine Kunzmann and Andreas Schmidt organized a track on Knowledge Maturing and Organizational Development with presenters from SAP, IPI and EnBW.

Knowledge Maturing & Organisational Culture: Results from a European Study
Andreas Schmidt,
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany
In this presentation, results from the interview study with respect to organizational culture and its impact on knowledge maturing
Competence Management as a Strategic Human Resource Development Instrument at EnBW
Ernst Biesalski,
EnBW AG, Germany
The strategic competence management approach of EnBW illustrates the potential of competence management for organizational development
Knowledge Maturing as a means for Requirements Engineering
René Peinl,
IPI GmbH, Germany
In this presentation, the application of the knowledge maturing process model to customer projects in a Sharepoint environment is illustrated. It shows the practical relevance and analytical power of the model.
It's tools! It's people! - Communicating KM Initiatives
Marie-Luise Groß,
SAP AG, Germany
Lessons learnt with respect to communication of knowledge management initiatives were summarized.

The experience exchange session, in which participants could share and discuss their experiences around the topics of the track, focussed on these aspects:

the role of guidance in knowledge maturing process
the problem of "lack of time" as a barrier as well as the role of management-by-objectives

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Athanasios Mazarakis

Christine Kunzmann

Narratives about knowledge maturing published

Andreas.Schmidt — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 22:49:24 +0000

As part of the interview study, the interviewers have also collected rich, contextualized stories they have been told by their interviewees. They are very good instruments for understanding real-world problems and good practices with respect to knowledge maturing. Now we have published these stories. Some of them are rather short and to the point about a specific insight gained, others are much more elaborate case studies.

MATURE paper on interview study receives STELLAR Stakeholder Distinct Award at ECTEL 2010

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 19:42:01 +0000

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.

Congratulations to all the authors for the paper and particularly for the efforts behind it!

Here are also the slides from the presentation:

Knowledge Maturing Activities and Practices Fostering Organisational Learning: Results of an Empirical Study

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt.

Persons:

Alan Brown

Alexander Sandow

Andreas Kaschig

Andreas Schmidt

Athanasios Mazarakis

Christine Kunzmann

Claire Bradley

Jenny Bimrose

Ronald Maier

Sally-Anne Barnes

Motivational and Affective Aspects in Technology-Enhanced Learning at ECTEL 2010 and ICT 2010

Andreas.Schmidt — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 08:46:50 +0000

MATURE has organized the MATEL workshop at this year’s edition of the ECTEL conference together with the European projects IntelLEO and MIRROR. 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). Presentation slides and papers are avaliable from the workshop page.

It was a great workshop with lot of interactivity and true interdisciplinary audience. Andreas Schmidt opened the workshop with a keynote talk, setting the theme of the workshop and presenting results from the MATURE project.

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.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Andrew Ravenscroft

Athanasios Mazarakis

Christine Kunzmann

Simone Braun

Professional Knowledge Management Conference 2011 in Innsbruck - From Knowlegde to Action

Andreas.Schmidt — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:15:22 +0000

MATURE organizes next year's edition of the Professional Knowledge Management Conference (WM2011) in Innsbruck, Austria. The Conference on Professional Knowledge Management provides a broad integrative overview of organizational, cultural, social and technical aspects on Knowledge Management. Focus of the conference is bringing together different research disciplines and sharing experiences gained in the different areas where knowledge management is being applied. The conference is hosted and organised by Ronald Maier and his team in Innsbruck. MATURE also organizes three workshops at this conference:

Contributions both from science and practice are welcome. Deadline is October 24, 2010.

Organizations:

University of Innsbruck

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Athanasios Mazarakis

Barbara Thönssen

Christine Kunzmann

Knut Hinkelmann

Michael Kohlegger

Ronald Maier

Knowledge Maturing in Europe - results of a large European study

Andreas.Schmidt — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:23:08 +0000

MATURE has conducted a large-scale empirical study as part of the second year with 139 interviews from companies in various business sectors and countries in Europe (and beyond, e.g., in China). The goal was to deepen the understanding of real world maturing practices and barriers to knowledge maturing. Towards that end, MATURE project members have engaged in conversations about knowledge maturing phases, activities, indicators, and barriers. The resulting data was analyzed in a mixed method approach, combining qualitative and quantitative data.

The empirical study team has now produced a concise summary of the study results:

A more extensive documentation of the results is available in the results section of the web site. Here you will also find

General contact and quantitative analysis: Ronald Maier, University of Innsbruck (ronald.maier@uibk.ac.at)
Qualitative data analysis and story telling: Alan Brown, University of Warwick (alan.brown@warwick.ac.uk) and Christine Kunzmann (kunzmann@fzi.de)

Organizations:

BOC Asset Management GmbH

CIMNE

Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz - University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

SAP

Structuralia

TU Graz

University of Innsbruck

University of Paderborn

University of Warwick

Persons:

Alan Brown

Alexander Sandow

Andreas Kaschig

Andreas Schmidt

Athanasios Mazarakis

Christine Kunzmann

Ronald Maier

Sally-Anne Barnes

People Tagging demonstrator evaluation - the "simplicity is fabulous"

Andreas.Schmidt — Wed, 12 May 2010 19:07:28 +0000

On May 11, the kick-off workshop for using the people tagging demonstrator as part of operational activities has taken place. Jenny Bimrose from University of Warwick and Simone Braun and Andreas Schmidt from FZI have introduced the people tagging system to an enlarged group of ten personal advisors at Connexions Northumberland after it had been substantially improved as a result of the participatory design phase with a core group from Connexions Northumberland.

The participants were enthusiastic about the system. They particularly liked the democratic approach to getting access to each other - and the simplicity of the system's usage ("the simplicity is fabulous"). One of the participants - who called herself a technophobe - concluded after the workshop that it was "very easy to use", "accessible", "friendly", "lovely", and she will definitely use it. While there are many ideas on how to improve it, the participants have insisted that we need to keep it as simple as it currently is.

The participants of the systems (plus potentially a number of additional members of the organization) will from now on use the system and provide the project the opportunity to study the knowledge maturing in such a sociotechnical system.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Jenny Bimrose

Simone Braun

Summary of demonstrators and motivational design approach

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 09 May 2010 21:29:03 +0000

Successful second MATURE Review

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 09 May 2010 21:00:04 +0000

Last week, the project has presented its results of the second year to the review panel. This encompassed the results of the representative studies and their implications on the knowledge maturing model as well as the demonstrator development, which brings together conceptual advances, architecture and integration work, and formative evaluation. The whole team has put tremendous effort in the preparation of the meeting, particularly because it was a very early project review.

The second review has continued to be a very fruitful conversation with experts in the field and provided the project with many ideas and suggestions for further development. From the review panel's side, the agile approach to project management, the design-driven approach to research and development as well as the combined qualitative and quantitative empirical approach and the amalgamation of the results in the knowledge maturing model landscape has been particularly appreciated.

Persons:

Alan Brown

Alexander Sandow

Andreas Kaschig

Andreas Schmidt

Andrew Ravenscroft

Barbara Thönssen

Christine Kunzmann

Graham Attwell

Hans Friedrich Witschel

Jenny Bimrose

John Cook

Karin Schöfegger

Knut Hinkelmann

Pablo Franzolini

Robert Woitsch

Ronald Maier

Simone Braun

Tobias Ley

Tobias Nelkner

Wilfrid Utz

Two Portuguese companies join the associate partner network

Andreas.Schmidt — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:12:07 +0000

We are proud to announce that our associate partner network has grown with two new partners from Portugal:

Representatives from those companies will join the associate partner meeting on April 16 in Vienna.

Knowledge Management 3.0 @ Learntec 2010

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:27:56 +0000

LEARNTEC is the leading international trade fair and convention for vocational education, learning and information technology. It provides information about different approaches to learning, using online and traditional media, which are both effective and free of time constraints.

At this year's edition, Prof. Rudi Studer, director at FZI and professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, was invited for a talk on Knowledge Management 3.0, in which he presented the MATURE approach and the people tagging demonstrator as a lightweight semantic approach to knowledge management.

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Continuous Competence Development: MATURE @ Professional Training Facts 2009

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:15:39 +0000

MATURE organized a track at this year's edition of the Professional Training Facts conference, which is an "industry meets science" event targeted at "learning - competence - performance". The MATURE track was about continuous competence development, focussing on one of the main aspects of MATURE: the continuity of learning in organizations.

Andreas Schmidt from FZI briefly introduced the notion of knowledge maturing and the general MATURE theme.
Michael Wyrsch from Credit Suisse presented the introduction of a lessons learned process at Credit Suisse as an example for successful knowledge maturing (focussed on content artefacts) in companies.
Uwe Riss from SAP presented the approach of bringing together task management and process management.
Simone Braun from FZI presented the people tagging approach as a bottom-up alternative (or complement) to traditional competence management approaches.

In a subsequent experience exchange session (moderated by Christine Kunzmann from FZI), the audience and the presenters collected their experiences with barriers to knowledge maturing, which provided a very rich picture of the various motivational problems:

Furthemore, MATURE had the most colourful booth in the collocated exhibition area with many interesting discussions and demonstrations.

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

SAP

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Christine Kunzmann

Simone Braun

Uwe Riss