In industrial and educational practice, learning environments are designed and implemented by experts from many different fields, reaching from traditional software development and product management to pedagogy and didactics. Workplace and lifelong learning, however, implicate that learners are more self-motivated, capable, and self-confident in achieving their goals and, consequently, tempt to consider that certain development tasks can be shifted to end-users in order to facilitate a more flexible, open, and responsive learning environment. With respect to streams like end-user development and opportunistic design, this paper elaborates a methodology for user-driven environment design for action-based activities. Based on a former research approach named ‘Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments’ (MUPPLE) we demonstrate how workplace and lifelong learners can be empowered to develop their own environment for collaborating in learner networks and which prerequisites and support facilities are necessary for this methodology.
Motivational aspects in knowledge management have so far largely been considered from the perspective of designing and implementing incentives that influence the extrinsic motivation of employees to participate, contribute, share etc. This is increasingly considered problematic so that this contribution takes a more holistic viewpoint by analyzing and systematizing barriers that have an impact on the motivation to engage in knowledge maturing activities. Based on a collaborative ethnographically informed study and targeted semistructured interviews, a model is presented that decomposes the motivational aspects. Furthermore, it is presented how motivational aspect can be incorporated into the design of learning support systems.
The requirements on learning support from knowledge work differ compared to traditional work. Based on those observations an approach for supporting learning in knowledge work is proposed considering requirements from e-learning as well as from knowledge management. In addition to traditional e-learning, on-demand e-learning takes the current situation of the knowledge worker into consideration to ensure learning support of knowledge work is proposed. For using a broad variety of resources in on demand e-learning a single metadata schema for describing seems not sufficient for every organisation. Therefore, application profiles appear adequate for describing resources used in the proposed approach for arranging knowledge elements. Identifying the knowledge workers current situation a learning need should be derived and to use it afterwards for selecting and delivering knowledge elements.
Standard based management systems (as ISO9001 quality, ISO14001 environmental, ISO27001 information security, ISO 22000 hygiene management systems and others) are widely implemented and based on common principles: objectives and strategies, business processes, resource management and continuously optimization. These systems must also be documented, communicated, implemented and continuously improved. Therefore they represent an optimal basis for an integrated learning organization, if the requirements of management systems are completely implemented. This documentation contains the explicit organizational knowledge, but it is almost felt as additional workload with a little or no advantage and it is not totally corresponding with the lived processes. Therefore it is hardly used as reference book for workplace need-oriented process integrated learning to improve the organization. Based on this situation we prepared the system documentation according to media-pedagogical and didactical principles and published it on organizational learning and knowledge system based on constructivist theory. In the case study the documentation support a confidence-based, open and fault-tolerant corporate and learning culture by promoting a need-oriented workplace process integrated learning, shorter initial training periods for new collaborators and a continuous optimization of the organization for securing a sustainable success for the organization.
Today, reuse-oriented software engineering covers the process of the development and evolution of software systems by reusing existing experience (i.e., products, processes, and knowledge). One of the major problems of software reuse is the lack of knowledge and skills for understanding reusable experience. This paper explains how the reuse process can be used to support individual learning on the one hand, and how learning can improve the selection of reuse experience and their application on the other hand. The paper emphasizes the importance
of context in the domain of reuse and how context information can be used to compose socalled Learning Spaces from Learning Components. Learning Spaces didactically enrich reusable experience and enhance experiential learning. The approach uses Wikis as a base technology for presenting and structuring learning content.
Verbal inter-human exchange forms an important part of informal learning, especially for workplace learning. But informal learning of an employee within inter-human communication implies informal teaching of another employee on the other side. And in the same way we try to integrate the learning process into the surrounding work processes, we also need to integrate the teaching process into the work processes on the teacher side. As a method for matching interests on both sides, we present in this paper the context-aware mediation of communication between the learner and the informal teacher.
Although both e-learning and knowledge management are about facilitating learning in organization, the major obstacle to bring both of them together can be traced back to different paradigms of learning, resulting from the different nature of the knowledge they are dealing with. In this paper, a knowledge maturing process is presented to illustrate the change of nature and the discontinuities. This lays the foundation for a better understanding. In order to overcome the discontinuities, the consideration of context is proposed, which offers the required continuity.