Andreas.Schmidt's blog

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

Third MATURE newsletter published

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:54:45 +0000

After successful completion of the first year's activities, MATURE is now in the middle of the exciting developments of the second year: We are moving from exploration of potential approaches to supporting knowledge maturing towards demonstrating their value in first prototypes. On the empirical strand, we are continuing our efforts to deepen our understanding of knowledge maturing and the real-world problems, but we are also here moving from a purely exploratory approach towards a combined exploratory and confirmatory approach with over 200 hundred structured interviews.

In this newsletter, we give you a brief introduction to some of the activities. We invite you to get in contact with us if you want to know more about it, or want to get involved as application partner for one of the demonstrators (see also http://mature-ip.eu/demonstrators), or want to participate in the interviews.

Promoting a shared understanding of competencies - position statement at IEEE LTSC WG20 meeting in Stuttgart

Andreas.Schmidt — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:26:47 +0000

Andreas Schmidt represented MATURE and its approach to competency definitions at the informal IEEE LTSC WG20 meeting. Its goal was to establish a - standardization body independent - group that develops a shared understanding of competency data management. A position statement was presented and lively discussed:

Competency Orientation within Companies: The Challenge of Different Requirements

View more presentations from Andreas Schmidt.

Participants of the workshop found the contributed use cases analysis (done as part of the People Tagging demonstrator developments) and the maturing perspective on competency modelling particularly useful. MATURE will stay involved in the process and support the further developments.

For the position paper, see the blog entry.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

MATURE @ I-KNOW 2009

Andreas.Schmidt — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:17:25 +0000

At this year's edition of the International Conference on Knowledge Management (I-KNOW 09), the MATURE has taken the opportunity to raise the awareness of the community for MATURE and to present the first year's results.

On the first day, there was an entire session on knowledge maturing from an organizational perspective:

Andreas Kaschig and Alexander Sandow presented the ethnographically informed study and the derived personas.
Roman Brun presented a framework for assessing knowledge maturing in an organizational context.
Andreas Martin presented a repository approach to organizational learning methods
Michael Kohlegger and Stefan Thalmann showed the results of a meta-analysis of maturity models in various domains.

Further presentations at the conference included:

Simone Braun provided a review of semantic social bookmarking approaches, including our SOBOLEO tools.
Christine Kunzmann and Andreas Schmidt proposed a methodology for motivational design in informal learning based on the findings of the ethnographically informed study and the subsequent model building.
Ying Du showed the further progress on semantic task management.
Ronald Maier gave a poster presentation of knowledge service governance.

Furthermore, all conference participants have received a MATURE flyer and had the opportunity to discuss with us at the MATURE booth in the exhibition area.

Persons:

Alexander Sandow

Andreas Kaschig

Andreas Schmidt

Barbara Thönssen

Christine Kunzmann

Johannes Magenheim

Karin Schöfegger

Michael Kohlegger

Nicolas Weber

Roman Brun

Ronald Maier

Simone Braun

Sophie Steinparz

Stefan Thalmann

Stefanie Lindstaedt

Tobias Ley

Tobias Nelkner

Ying Du

MATURE Workshop on User Centred Requirements Processes for E-Learning and Knowledge Management – A European-Wide Perspective

Andreas.Schmidt — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:41:18 +0000

On July 2, 2009 LTRI (London Metropolitan University) hosted the successful MATURE Workshop on User Centred Requirements Processes for E-Learning and Knowledge Management – A European-Wide Perspective. The day enabled the cross fertilisation of ideas between MATURE and other key European projects, research centres and individuals. The formal presentations and discussions were of a high quality and the slides from these can be viewed by following the links for talks in the agenda (above). Furthermore, the informal discussion over coffee and lunch were insightful and wide-ranging.

What follows is a highly selective summary of some of the workshops (colleagues are invited to add to this document their own reflections from the day).

Following coffee, delegates were welcome by workshop organiser John Cook and Andreas Schmidt (Scientific coordinator MATURE). Liliane Esnault (E.M.LYON, PALETTE) then gave a detailed account of her reflections on participatory design and ‘actor-networks’, participatory interviews, etc, and noted that participatory design takes time but is rewarding. PALETTE used the notion of ‘observers’ and mediators providing the link between Communities of Practice and the project. One innovation included the alignment of interest tool. There was a reported tension between local teams and the project’s interests; however alignment was achieved by following a process of writing and rewriting scenarios. This can be regarded as a building block towards generic scenarios. A key lesson learnt was that “boundary construction is a duel process” and that Liliane Esnault decided to ‘ban’ the word “need” and instead promoted talk of “interest”.

John Cook (MATURE) presented work on mobile learner requirements with an emphasis on the links between informal and formal learning. The talk presented: a simplified overview of what mobile learner requirements may need to consider, which includes the notion of conversations across contexts; a Twitter hashmob as an instance of how experts communicate and learn using mobile devices and social software; four examples of mobile learner requirements; the notion that a possible demonstrator in mobility & mobile devices in MATURE; and the idea that in the near future we will need to scaffold the mobile wave. Graham Atwell (MATURE) described PLEs from the perspective of learners developing their own profiles, teamwork and ‘dense’ networks. He went on to describe Wookie’s use of widgets in Moodle with Google Wave in the background in TenCompetence. Stefan Thalmann (MATURE) described the ethnographic study and the emergence of personas as a key concept; Liliane Esnault confirmed that this notion was also a key for PALETTE. MATURE views personas as an idealised user (based on several real users) and this is regarded as a hot area for knowledge management. 21 personas were reduced by a clustering process involving similarities to 5 primary personas. This work is also looking at long running knowledge maturing cases, indicators for maturing, and scenarios (and approach also adopted by PALETTE). Amir Dotan (APOSDLE ) mentioned that personas were also used in APOSDLE but that they have a short work span. Furthermore, Liliane Esnault commented on the issue of: how to shift from real users to personas? If you get an alignment of interests of the personas with the interests of the designers then you get a problem. Andreas Schmidt noted however that the designers in MATURE had been involved in the translation process and this had to an extent minimised these problems.

Fred de Vries (CELSTEC, OU NL) gave an overview of CELSTEC primary direction in terms of their programme in ‘Learning Media’; this involves work on the 3 themes: immersive, social and mobile technologies. Fred de Vries mentioned that the mobile work was a good connection point for collaboration. CELSTEC’s work indicates that students and staff are not using the VLE and will only use new technology if you keep it simple. He also highlighted that their work was becoming student focussed, whilst also noting that end users are also teachers. CELSTEC’s work also involves the drafting of learning scenarios (an approach noted earlier) and suggested that usability tools should allow good diagrams. In terms of mobiles, key questions involved how to integrate resources on all devices (learning services at the moment are still seen as an add-on) and that the context for learning was changing to include the home. Various answers were offered to the question ‘what is the value added of mobiles? One answer was that we shouldn’t worry about which media a learner is using because innovations like Google Wave will allow learning to take place on all platforms. Also, John Cook noted that as there were over 4 billion mobile devices users in the world it seemed to follow that we should design for the device of choice of over half the worlds populations; because these are personal devices that go everywhere with the learner they can be used to span the gap between informal, formal, personal and organisational learning. Regarding the question of learners wanting an answer to a question within one hour, Fred de Vries stated that it depends on the level of service that you pay for; you pay more for a premium response time.

After lunch Martin Wolpers and Effie Law (ROLE) noted that their goal was to involve as many people as possible at the start of this new Integrating Project so as to avoid a narrowing down of ideas and direction. Some directions include user driven aggregation, workshops and focus groups, virtual focus groups, screen capture technology for examining usage patterns, learning surveys, and so on. The point being that all of these techniques should be contextual, adaptive and self-regulating. ROLE are also working with recommender systems (both engines and people) and looking to incorporate Google Wave in their architecture and a process model of the learning cycle. A challenge is to cater for almost every type of learner. The question was raised: is Google Wave the answer? Martin Wolpers offered that is was, but warned that there were privacy issues. Will the ‘Wave’ servers be gathering data on what people do? The example was given of the German case where Google Docs licence means that Google have the rights to you IP contained in the documents through to their licensing agreement. ROLE examines the way widgets interact with wookie and complex data modelling. Martin Wolpers concluded that he wants to keep the tension between the institutional view and the personal view running until the end of the project so as to stimulate debate.

Johannes Magenheim (MATURE) gave a useful overview of Computer Science strategies of requirements analysis for system development in the area of KM and E-learning. Key techniques are STEPS & UC-GORE (User Centred Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering) & SCRUM. The latter is a process skeleton approach, which contains sets of practices and predicted roles. A key idea is ‘futures workshops’ for brainstorming ideas, which links in with the ROLE approach. There is a need to combine/reconcile that fact that we are engaging in research and the needs of the partners/customer (who often want a quicker outcome) and the future. Jenny Bimrose (MATURE) looked at end users and developers from the viewpoint of reconciling competing perspectives. There are differing narratives, developers need to change the language they uses when communicating with end users. We need to make a difference and take the user from where they are, understand the context, adopt agile and flexible approaches as requirements change, and foster the emergence of a community. Liliane Esnault concurred, saying that we need to explain what is possible and what we will do together. The final session of the day came from Andreas Schmidt and Andrew Ravenscroft (MATURE) on user centred Requirements processes in MATURE. The general methodological approach is a Design Based Research one. This involved Design Studies, which are 8 critical experiments in design that explored key aspects that needed to be validated prior to embarking on a full-scale draft requirements specification. Another aspects included use case development & requirements specification as a moderated bottom-up process with focus on the maturing phases. Finally, Demonstrators were described covering groups of use cases with high priority that provide a coherent theme for year 2 that will constitute the 1st Prototype after year 2.

All participants seemed to agree that this had been a highly productive day and the organisers promised to hold follow up activities in order to keep the momentum and intellectual clarity generated on the day going.

Orginal summary written by John Cook, 10th July 2009

Slides are available under http://mature-ip.eu/en/event/user-centered-requirements-engineering

Organizations:

Learning Technology Research Institute @ London Metropolitan University

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Andrew Ravenscroft

Claire Bradley

Graham Attwell

Jenny Bimrose

Johannes Magenheim

John Cook

Karin Schöfegger

Nicolas Weber

Stefan Thalmann

MATURE exceeded expectations at 1st Annual Review

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:13:06 +0000

MATURE presented its progress of the first year to three distinguished experts in the field in a very constructive atmosphere. The reviewers have shown a high degree of interest in the topic of knowledge maturing and engaged in an inspiring dialogue with the consortium.
The project management approach, the team spirit and coherence as well as the progress on empirical, conceptual, and technical level were highly appreciated. The project "exceeded the expectations" of both the EC and the independent reviewers.

First year deliverables available

Andreas.Schmidt — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:47:02 +0000

The official project deliverables, summarizing the results of the first year, are now online available under http://mature-ip.eu/result/deliverables-year-1 as PDF.

First Associate Partner Network Meeting - Karlsruhe, April 30, 2009

Andreas.Schmidt — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:50:53 +0000

The MATURE consortium was pleased to welcome almost 20 representatives of partners from different countries like Germany, Switzerland, Spain, United Kingdom, or Israel, both from industry and research (about two thirds from industry). Their background was very different, but all of them had a shared interest in the topic of knowledge maturing support in organizations. The event took place at FZI in Karlsruhe, and consortium representatives gave a brief overview of the activities of the first year of MATURE.

Participants were very actively engaged in interesting discussions and have brought in their opinions, experiences, and expectations - and their willingness to join forces on subjects related to MATURE. The event also helped the participants to make new contacts.

Project Overview

As Scientific Coordinator of the project, Andreas Schmidt from FZI provided an overview of the project and the conceptual model behind it with a particular focus on the participatory design approach with a high degree of user involvement and the bottom-up research activities that have yielded innovative solutions at a very early stage. Within the discussion, the relationship of knowledge maturing to guidance was particularly in the focus.

Content Maturing for Career Guidance

Jenny Bimrose from the Institute for Employment Research at University of Warwick and Nicolas Weber from TU Graz presented the user-centered design process and the prototype for supporting content maturing based on Semantic MediaWiki and widgets that provide knowledge maturing support.

Maturing Business Processes

Hans-Friedrich Witschel from SAP illustrated the ideas for supporting process maturing by presenting the design study and the demonstrator planning, combining business process support with personal task management, which enables knowledge workers to evolve business processes within their daily work practice

People Tagging and Knowledge Maturing Dialogues

Simone Braun from FZI presented the novel approach of MATURE to competence management and expert finding, bridging the world of tagging and the more formal world of ontologies. This idea triggered a lot of interest in the audience, and the resulting discussion brought forward many very good ideas, but equally important also challenges that have to be tackled to embed these solutions into the corporate reality.

In the second part of the talk, joint work with Andrew Ravenscroft from LTRI was presented that tackled the problem of collaborative evolution of a shared understanding through dialogue games.

Visions of PLME & OLME

Tobias Nelkner from University of Paderborn opened the afternoon session with a vision on the Personal Learning & Maturing Environment that will be one of the major outcomes of MATURE.
Barbara Thönssen from University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland presented the organizational perspective and showed a decomposition of maturing support into five different types of services that form the Organizational Learning & Maturing Environment

The event concluded with an open discussion space where many ideas and experiences could be exchanged and concrete steps were discussed how to collaborate with MATURE. We are looking forward to the further steps!

The slides from the event are available from here.

IFIP AGORA Initiative on Life-long Learning & Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences join the MATURE Associate Partner Network

Andreas.Schmidt — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:26:24 +0000

We are please to announce that we can welcome two new associate partners to our growing network, which help us to reach out to a wider audience and bring in their international experience, IFIP and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences.

IFIP (International Federation of Information Processing) is the leading multinational organization in Information & Communications Technologies and Sciences. Its AGORA initiative aims to implement a dynamic methodology for initiating cooperation projects on Lifelong Learning with stakeholders such as UNESCO, UNITAR, the Digital Solidarity Fund and other IFIP Technical committees.The methodology takes into account that there is not one solution to Lifelong Learning and also that a lot of preliminary work still has to be done on issues such as reference competencies for LLL, e-portfolio and competency recognition, before effective implementation of LLL can be made a reality. Agora planning meetings provide a forum for: sharing knowledge, facilitating networking of stakeholders and developing synergy, outlining cooperative projects to address the issues in the framework of main international programmes, defining a work process for continued planning and cooperation.

The ICT Commission of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) has working groups in e-Education, e-Health, and e-Society, and is highly interested into joint activities with MATURE in areas like Learning Organization, e-Portfolio, Competence Management & Recognition, Knowledge Management and knowledge sharing.

Persons:

Johannes Magenheim

MATURE project thesis on motivation and incentives wins student award at Pforzheim University

Andreas.Schmidt — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 07:56:33 +0000

FZI has established joint activities with the Human Resources Competence Center at Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences, which is member of MATURE's associate partner network. Christine Kunzmann and Prof. Fritz Gairing have supervised a project thesis of an engaged team of five students who investigated the topic of motivation and incentives informal learning.

Based on existing studies and models in diverse fields (psychology, human resources management, economics, among others) they have synthesized their own model, which is one of the foundations for MATURE's model on the motivational barriers to knowledge maturing.

They have validated their model and their theoretical findings with the help of semi-structured interviews at a large software company and a large energy company in the southwest of Germany. The full project thesis is available here (in German). The team consists of Volker Braun, David Czech, Benjamin Fletschinger, Silke Kohler, and Verena Lüber, all of them students of human resources management.

Recently, they have received a student award for their excellent work (see also press release of Pforzheim University and of Stadtwerke Pforzheim, in German). Congratulations!

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Hochschule Pforzheim - Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Christine Kunzmann

Conference on Professional Knowledge Management - Experiences and Visions (WM 2009)

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:53:19 +0000

This year's edition of the biennial conference on Professional Knowledge Management (WM 2009) was organized by Knut Hinkelmann and his team at FHNW (most of whom actively contribute to MATURE) and took place March 25-27, 2009 in the beautiful city of Solothurn in Switzerland. With almost 200 participants, the conference again attracted the German-speaking knowledge management community, both from industry and academia. MATURE flyers were part of the conference package handed to each participant of the conference, and MATURE partner BOC had an exhibition stand

Furthermore, Tobias Ley and Andreas Schmidt jointly organized on behalf of MATURE and APOSDLE the First Workshop on Knowledge Services and Mashups on Friday. The workshop attracted almost 30 participants with presentations from

the EU-IP WeKnowIt (Ansgar Scherp from University of Koblenz-Landau), presenting a classification of Web 2.0 functionality and and emergency response scenario
the MINERVA project (Thomas Fischer from University of Jena), presenting a state of the art survey of mashup approaches
the EU-STREP FAST (Volker Hoyer from SAP Research St. Gallen), presenting a mashup environment

The workshop had lively discussions, particularly on the notion of mashups and the differences to context-aware portals, service-oriented architectures etc. Also non-technical issues have been raised, e.g., security, changes to business models of consultants.

We are looking forward to the next edition of this workshop at the WM 2011 in Innsbruck, organized by Ronald Maier and his team at Innsbruck!

Organizations:

Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz - University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

TU Graz

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Barbara Thönssen

Daniela Feldkamp

Knut Hinkelmann

Rainer Telesko

Simon Nikles

Tobias Ley

Joint activities with the ACTIVE IP

Andreas.Schmidt — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:28:43 +0000

MATURE has established close contacts to the ACTIVE IP ever since both projects have started. It was clear that both projects have an overlap in their vision of Web 2.0-enabled tools.

ACTIVE aims to increase the productivity of knowledge workers in a pro-active, contextualised, yet easy and unobtrusive way. The aim is to convert tacit and unshared knowledge – the "hidden intelligence" of enterprises – into transferable, interoperable and actionable knowledge to support seamless collaboration and to enable problem solving. A key aspect will be the support for informal procedural knowledge - the informal collaboration and problem-solving tasks that drive much knowledge work in the enterprise.

ACTIVE and MATURE will jointly develop appropriate APIs for the Semantic MediaWiki, enabling the wiki platform to form part of mashups.
MATURE will provide the SOBOLEO tool to support an ACTIVE use case where tagging of resources is brought together with wiki-based knowledge and ontology modeling.
ACTIVE has adopted the knowledge maturing model to describe and understand the evolutionary processes in Web 2.0 enabled enterprises. Frank Dengler has already presented a first approach to wiki-based process modeling based on the maturing model at the Knowledge Management conference WM 2009 at Solothurn.

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Simone Braun

New Associate Partners: OHL (Spain), CfTB Education Trust (UK), and The East Midlands Consortium Chief Executives Group (UK)

Andreas.Schmidt — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:59:34 +0000

We are happy to announce that the first year developments together with our application partners University of Warwick (and the associate partners Connexions Kent & Medway and Careers Scotland) and Structuralia have raised the interest from further organizations that have now joined the associate partner network. These are:

OHL (Obrascón Huarte Lain, S.A.) in Spain, which is a leading international contraction, concessions, environment, developments and industrial group and Spain's sixth largest construction firm.
The East Midlands Consortium exists to develop collaborative arrangements to improve the delivery of information, advice and guidance (IAG) across the East Midlands region of England. The development of more effective LMI communication systems has been identified as a priority activity to support our national agenda for 14-19 curriculum reform and led to the formation of a regional working group. This group is currently developing curriculum and guidance checklists to aid teachers and advisers in the integration of LMI more fully into their IAG activities.
CfBT Education Trust is a leading education consultancy and service organisation. Their object is to provide education for public benefit both in the UK and internationally.

MATURE is looking forward to collaborating! The associate partner network event on April 30 will be a key opportunity - all three new partners have already confirmed their attendance.

LinkedIn Networking Group Launched

Andreas.Schmidt — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:41:43 +0000

In order facilitate networking with the consortium and among MATURE's associate partners, we have created a LinkedIn group. You are invited to join and start discussing how the MATURE Associate Partner meeting on April 30, 2009 in Karlsruhe should look like!

Credit Suisse joins associate partner network

Andreas.Schmidt — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:33:34 +0000

Following MATURE's presentation at the I-KNOW conference 2008, Credit Suisse has decided to join the MATURE associate partner network.
"We would like to pass over the experience of organizational maturing into the MATURE project and on the other side implement some ideas that this project will generate. Besides that we would be happy to contribute our longtime experience in the field of knowledge management."
The MATURE consortium considers Credit Suisse to be a valuable addition to the network.

MATURE at ICOPER Competence Symposium Berlin

Andreas.Schmidt — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 08:04:56 +0000

The recently started ICOPER project organized a workshop at the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) on December 4, 2008. The organizers managed to assemble most of the European projects dealing with competencies. The project aims at kicking off and fostering a standardization effort for a semantically enriched standard on competency-related issues, geared towards employability processes. MATURE’s scientific coordinator Andreas Schmidt participated in and contributed to the workshop.

While in general this is a good idea and could boost competency-oriented approaches, the discussions also showed hot areas:

What is a competency? What is the difference between competence and competency? What is its relationship to performance, capability, potential? And to activities (a term used in the German DIN proposal)?`
To what extent does an exchange standard make sense if we don’t have (and probably never will have) competency standards? Or will we have?
- For some of the participants, factoring out context out of competencies was key.
- For others – more to the MATURE direction – competency definitions are social artefacts under constant negotiation.
Competency-orientation of universities was also seen critical: is the sole mission of the university to build up competencies needed for workplace performance?

The ICOPER project set up a Google site to collect the materials.

So the competency topic remains exciting, and we will definitely stay on board.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

First partner newsletter

Andreas.Schmidt — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:51:12 +0000

The first six months of the MATURE project have been an exciting time - finding efficient ways of working both internally and with external partners, attending and organizing events like the ECTEL conference with a workshop on Enterprise 2.0, the I-KNOW conference, or the PROLEARN/EATEL Summer School on Technology-Enhanced Learning etc. But most important: we have started our different strands of activity: the ethnographic studies, concept development, technical integration of existing tool, and early formative evaluation.

In the first edition of our partner newsletter, we give you a quick overview about the latest developments and activities.

Here is the full PDF.

Results of the first six months

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:46:11 +0000

MATURE has started with a high level of activity and motivation of all participants in April 2008 and has so far managed to sustain those high standards. The project work has been organized according to an adapted agile approach in different strands of activities, which have regular synchronization points (every three months, together with consortium meetings). These activities include

empirical work, focussing on ethnographic studies in the first year and deriving from them requirements for an adapted maturing model on the one hand, but also personas for guiding software development
conceptual work, clarifying, aligning, and deepening the understanding of the underlying conceptual model(s), such as knowledge maturing (process), guidance, personal learning & maturing environment, organizational learning & maturing environment, among others.
technical work, integrating, adapting, and developing further existing tools embedded into a participatory design philosophy, which means in close interaction with users and user representatives within the frame of design studies
evaluation, extending the formative evaluation approach to even earlier phases of the project in order to be able to draw sound conclusions from technical and conceptual work

Almost 50 persons from the consortium partners were involved in these activities, and we could also achieve mutual benefit from cooperation with a large part of our associate partner network already, such as the participation of GISA, Synaxon, Klinikum Karlsruhe, Connexions Kent & Medway, and Swisscom in the ethnographic studies, but also research collaboration like with Pforzheim University on organizational learning and human resource management.
In addition to that, MATURE has been very active in creating awareness about the project and its ideas and disseminating initial results by organizing events like the Learning in Enterprise 2.0 workshop at ECTEL 2008 and the OntoContent 2008 workshop at the OTM Federated Conferences 2008, and contributing to conferences like COOP 2008, I-KNOW 2008, or OnlineEduca 2008 in Berlin.
If you want to find out more: we have set up a results page on which we collect and continuously the preliminary outcome of the project.

MATURE as part of iRegion Karlsruhe @ AKWM Symposium

Andreas.Schmidt — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:24:11 +0000

On the yearly knowledge management symposion organized by the AKWM Karlsruhe, Andreas Schmidt presented 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).

Organizations:

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

MATURE @ ECTEL 2008

Andreas.Schmidt — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 08:21:02 +0000

At this year's ECTEL conference in Maastricht, MATURE took the opportunity to present the results of the first months to the European TEL community.

Andreas Schmidt organized the Learning in Enterprise 2.0 workshop, which explored the implications of the Enterprise 2.0 movement and ideas to technology-enhanced learning.
In this workshop, Stefan Thalmann presented an informal learning typology based on the first ethnographic study results (Informal learner styles: Individuation, interaction, in-form-ation)
Tobias Nelkner moderated an interactive slot on a
Concept of a Tool Wrapper Infrastructure for Supporting Services in a PLE
Finally, Andrew Ravenscroft introduced a design study of combining the SOBOLEO tool for supporting ontology maturing and the Interloc tool for argument games (as part of building a shared understanding in an enterprise 2.0 in a bottom-up fashion). See for more details.
Graham Attwell was actively engaged in the MUPPLE workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments and stressed the importance of considering informal learning in the PLE discussion. His presentation on Maturing learning: Mash up Personal Learning Environments focused on the roll-out of a first PLE together with University of Warwick based on Wordpress-based Freefolio.
Nicolas Weber from Graz University of Technology participated in the Doctoral Consortium and showed the current status of his work on The Evolution of Social Ontologies.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Andrew Ravenscroft

Graham Attwell

Nicolas Weber

Stefanie Lindstaedt

Tobias Nelkner

Wolfgang Reinhardt

Conceptual Overview of MATURE at I-KNOW 2008

Andreas.Schmidt — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:46:52 +0000

The I-KNOW conference, which is organized by the Know-Center in Graz is the yearly event for discussing new ideas on knowledge management, and learning support in corporate environments.

This year, Ronald Maier presented the underlying conceptual model of MATURE to a wider audience and did a great job in painting the big picture and agenda, based on the paper Conceptual Foundations for a Knowledge & Learning Architecture: Supporting Content, Process, and Ontology Maturing.

Conceptual Foundations for a Knowledge & Learning Architecture: Supporting Content, Process, and Ontology Maturing

View SlideShare presentation

Ronald Maier furthermore gave a talk on collaborative tagging ("Collaborative Tagging als Teil von Wissensinfrastrukturen für Unternehmen") in the German-speaking Professors4Industry track. An additional interview can be found on the Austrian Computerwelt and the Know-Center blog.

These contributions were complemented by the Know-Center booth at the exhibition where interested participants could also get additional information on MATURE.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Knut Hinkelmann

Ronald Maier

Stefanie Lindstaedt

Tobias Ley

Uwe Riss

Ethnographic Studies have started

Andreas.Schmidt — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:43:48 +0000

As one of the main activities of the first year work in the empirical strand, the ethnographic studies have started. After the pre-study in May by University of Innsbruck at the associate partner GISA, the main studies have now started:

Synaxon (by University of Paderborn),
Klinikum Karlsruhe (by FZI),
Swisscom (by FHNW),
STRUCTURALIA (by CIMNE),
and at Connexions KENT (by UWAR and PONT)

All of them are partners or associate partners of MATURE.

These studies explore the current practices related to knowledge maturing and particularly focuses on experienced barriers. Ronald Maier and Stefan Thalmann from University of Innsbruck have prepared detailed guidelines for the ethnographers and assisted the start of the studies at the different sites.

Stefan Thalmann and Ronald Maier will present the first results from analyzing the pre-study (a typology of informal learners) at the Learning in Enterprise 2.0 workshop at the ECTEL 2008 conference.

Graham Attwell started a discussion on communication toools based on his study experiences.

SYNAXON employees blogged about the ethnographic study (in German).

Organizations:

CIMNE

Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz - University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Pontydysgu

Structuralia

Swisscom

TU Graz

University of Innsbruck

University of Paderborn

University of Warwick

Persons:

Barbara Thönssen

Christine Kunzmann

Daniela Feldkamp

Graham Attwell

Jenny Bimrose

Knut Hinkelmann

Miguel Amérigo

Pablo Franzolini

Ronald Maier

Sally-Anne Barnes

Stefan Thalmann

Tobias Nelkner

Klinikum Karlsruhe joins the associate partner network

Andreas.Schmidt — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:36:52 +0000

The Municipal Hospital Karlsruhe (Klinikum Karlsruhe gGmbH)has joined the MATURE associate partner network and participates in the ethnographic studies in their training department for the nursery domain. The hospital is particulary interested in improving their training processes to accomodate to the changing requirements in the health care sector.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Christine Kunzmann

Successful Innsbruck Consortium Meeting

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:01:33 +0000

The second MATURE consortium meeting took place at Innsbruck in the beautiful Tyrolean alps, hosted by Ronald Maier and his team. The meeting was characterized by the continuing good spirit of the project team.

On the first day, there was an ethnographers' meeting. With the ethographic studies starting in August, the UIBK team has provided extensive preparation material and their first experiences with a pre-study.

The focus of the rest of the meeting was advancing the conceptualization of the Personal Learning & Maturing Environment (PLME) and the Organizational Learning & Maturing Environment (OLME). Conceptual foundations for these environments were presented as well as first concrete mock-up ideas.

MATURE @ EATEL Summer School in Ohrid

Andreas.Schmidt — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:40:11 +0000

MATURE has supported the Summer School for technology-enhanced learning, organized by the PROLEARN successor EATEL in Ohrid, with speakers and young researchers, working in the disparate fields of expertise which promote the advancement of TEL at the workplace.

Knowledge & Ontology Maturing

The MATURE presentation Knowledge Maturing - a different perspective on learning by Andreas Schmidt and Pablo Franzolini, MATURE's coordinator team, opened the summer school. The presentation aimed at widening the students' perspective on learning from informal to formal learning and at providing a structure for this diverse learning landscape.

In the afternoon, a joint APOSDLE-MATURE workshop (organized by Simone Braun, Tobias Ley, and Andreas Schmidt) provided students the opportunity for hands-on experience with knowledge maturing and of the emerging MATURE tools (SOBOLEO). Students were asked to use the semantic social bookmarking application to annotate papers on elearningpapers.eu with their own tags and later collaboratively consolidate those tags into a topic hierarchy for the field. The real-time capabilities and AJAX functionality of SOBOLEO proved particularly useful for that purpose. In a third session, students and organizers collectively reflected on observations, experiences, and problems. For the MATURE team, this resulted in a set of interesting ideas and phenomena into which we will investigate further.

Personal Learning Environments

On Wednesday, Graham Attwell (who also successfully introduced the microblogging practice via Twitter at the summer school) stimulated a discussion on personal learning environments and the its role for the generation of digital natives. In the afternoon, the PLE discussion was continued in a workshop in which participants were asked to sketch their own PLE.

Intensive intra-project and inter-project discussions

The MATURE participants (which included also - in addition the presenters - Tobias Nelkner, Wolfgang Reinhardt, and Nicolas Weber) also used the time at Ohrid for exchanging ideas and experiences with other projects (e.g., with PALETTE and its participatory design approach to support Communities of Practice), but also as an opportunity for engaging into discussions to promote project progress, e.g., the notion of a personal learning & maturing environment, or useful maturing services.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Graham Attwell

Nicolas Weber

Pablo Franzolini

Simone Braun

Tobias Ley

Tobias Nelkner

SYNAXON AG joins MATURE

Andreas.Schmidt — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:00:00 +0000

SYNAXON (based in Bielefeld, Germany) is a company that builds upon wikis and their paradigm for their complete internal knowledge management and documentation processes. This provides MATURE with an excellent study object to collect experiences, good and bad practices as part of the ethnographic studies.

Persons:

Johannes Magenheim

Tobias Nelkner

Knowledge Maturing Presentation at PROLEARN/EATEL Summer School at Ohrid

Andreas.Schmidt — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:35:23 +0000

A team from the MATURE project is currently at the PROLEARN/EATEL Summer School at Ohrid to network with other researchers in the field of technology enhanced learning. The presentation on Knowledge Maturing by Andreas Schmidt and Pablo Franzolini (the coordination team) opened the first day and already received interesting feedback.

The slides are available from here: Knowledge Maturing - a different perspective on learning, also available on Slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

For more up-to-date summer school information, see Twitter images or pictures on Flickr.

Persons:

Andreas Schmidt

Pablo Franzolini

MATURE organizes two workshops

Andreas.Schmidt — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:55:44 +0000

The MATURE IP (co-)organized two workshop events this year:

1st International Workshop on Learning in Enterprise 2.0 and Beyond, European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ECTEL 08), September 2008, Maastricht, The Netherlands. This workshop aims at exploring the new challenges and opportunities of a participatory enterprise 2.0. This includes personal learning environments and the tension of the individual, community and organizational scope as well as motivational and social issues.
3rd International Workshop on Ontology content and evaluation in Enterprise (OntoContent '08), OnTheMove Federated Conferences, November 2008, Monterrey, Mexico. The workshop's theme is to collect experiences with ontologies in the wild, particularly in the field of human resources and e-health & ambient assisted living. It aims at supporting the development of a Web 3.0, which is understood as a user-oriented Semantic Web. It encourages to take a more dynamic, user- and community-driven, lightweight approach to engineering and maintaining ontologies as it will be explored within the MATURE IP.

We invite different types of submissions and are looking forward to interesting discussions at the workshops!

Successful MATURE Kick-Off Meeting

Andreas.Schmidt — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 13:47:39 +0000

The MATURE IP has started. The kick-off meeting has taken place at FZI in Karlsruhe, Germany, and showed engagement and interest in the project. The high level of interaction among the participants in the plenary sessions, during the breaks and the evening events have shown that we have already formed a good team part of which is on the photo taken on the last day of the meeting.

Martin Májek from the European Commission, who is the responsible project officer, took the opportunity to get a view at the persons involved in MATURE and attended the first day of the kick-off meeting and provided an overview of the rules and expectations from the side of the funding institution.

Both on the empirical, the methodological, and the technical strand of the MATURE, the respective work packages have started their activity in a well-prepared manner, raised important questions and stated challenges at the meeting that are going to be addressed in the next series of work package level meetings in Bremen, Karlsruhe, and Innsbruck.

Organizations:

BOC Asset Management GmbH

CIMNE

Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz - University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Learning Technology Research Institute @ London Metropolitan University

Pontydysgu

SAP

Structuralia

TU Graz

University of Innsbruck

University of Paderborn

University of Warwick

Persons:

Alan Brown

Andreas Kaschig

Andreas Schmidt

Andrew Ravenscroft

Christine Kunzmann

Clemens van Dinther

Daniela Feldkamp

Eduardo Car

Ernie Ong

Graham Attwell

Jenny Bimrose

Johannes Magenheim

John Cook

Knut Hinkelmann

Michael Kohlegger

Nicolas Weber

Olga Villarreal

Pablo Franzolini

Robert Woitsch

Ronald Maier

Simone Braun

Stefan Thalmann

Stefanie Lindstaedt

Tobias Ley

Tobias Nelkner

Torsten Leidig

Uwe Riss

Wilfrid Utz