Today I have started my new position at Karlsruhe University of Applied Science (Hochschule Karlsruhe) as professor for enterprise social media and mobile business. It is a promising new environment for doing teaching and continuing research in the fields of knowledge management, social media, and mobile technologies.

The last weeks I have been already busy preparing lectures and opportunities for research collaboration (and have already received remarkable support from my new colleagues and others at the university. By the way, don’t get confused – one of my new colleagues has exactly the same name – so in the future I will add a middle initial “P.” to disambiguate.

I will still continue several activities I have started, most notably I will give my best to coordinate the MATURE project until its completion.

Over the last five years, my research has focused on knowledge maturing, a macroscopical perspective on knowledge development that clearly points out that

• knowledge (and associated learning processes) have different characteristics depending on the maturity of knowledge, which also helps to explain how different areas like creative and collaboration support, knowledge management, and e-learning and training, how formal and informal learning relate to each other
• a knowledge development process is not continuous (as it should be), but is faced with various characteristic barriers between maturity phases

Together with various European partners (as part of the MATURE IP), we have created a thorough understanding of knowledge maturing, based on empirical studies (ethnographic, interview, case study) and participatory design processes (following a design-based research methodology). We have amalgamated this into a knowledge maturing model landscape. Based on the feedback we received and the experiences we made, we are also now offering a consulting and training offering with a network of experienced consultants.

All of this is now presented under a single point of access: knowledge-maturing.com. There will be also a German speaking version under wissensreifung.de and wissensreifung.ch. Both versions are are currently heavily under construction.

The last days I was at the Professional Knowledge Management conference in Innsbruck, organized by Ronald Maier and his team (really well done!). While there were respectable ~150 participants (with a lot of “known faces”), it is also obvious that knowledge management is no longer a hype topic. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially because among the participants there was a consensus that this event provides value to the participants in terms of exchanging ideas.

The hot topics (some which have been around for quite some years) from my perception were:

• social software and its sibling enterprise 2.0
• human factors of knowledge management

In addition, leadership has emerged in many places although little concrete contributions could be spotted (apart from the keynote talk by von Krogh). Definitely not a hot topic was technology as such, and I could even sense a lot of aversion against too much technology in the field. Particularly, anything related to AI was not welcome at all at the conference – although it was raised in some discussions. This reaffirms the shift of knowledge management from technology towards human and organizational factors. While I would agree that this is a good path, the conference has also shown to me that we are still struggling in research with its implications on research goals and methods. Definitely it will mean more empirical research (like we started in the MATURE project), particularly beyond questionnaires with the use of ethnographic methods and case studies (like Koch & Richter do). For more technology-oriented research, this will probably increase the importance of design research approaches. Definitely, we still more maturity of knowledge on this new paradigm of knowledge management that goes beyond rather generic principles.

I had the opportunity of giving an invited talk at the talkIT workshop, organized by the local “Standortagentur” of Tyrol. I have outline the implications of knowledge maturing on developing IT solutions (basically shifting models from design-time to run-time constructs) and on the competencies required for IT workers.

Together with my colleagues Christine Kunzmann and Athanasios Mazarakis, I have also organized the workshop on Motivational, Social and Cultural Aspects of Knowledge Management. For this workshop, I gave a keynote talk which summarized the findings of our empirical studies in MATURE:

There were great discussions in the workshop, but I have left with the impression that beyond common sense, we still know little about motivational, social, and cultural aspects in terms of implications for designing systems. I am looking forward to further research on the subject.

Just stumbled upon one of Gartner’s predictions for strategic technologies in 2011. What is great to see is that context-aware computing as well as ubiquitous computing are becoming mainstream and is now considered to be the topic with high impact.

From a TechRepublic article:

The idea here is that social analytics and computing leads to knowledge about preferences. User interfaces would change based on context. Today, it’s all reactive. By 2011 to 2013, there will be more proactive alerts. By 2014 to 2018, you’ll have context integrated with enterprise systems. Ultimately, there will be a context platform. Portals, mashups, mobile, and social will combine. Vendors will offer “user experience platforms.”

Great to see that a favorite research topic of mine is now getting hyped.

But not only in the marketing-driven world, this is becoming a hot topic, we are also still working on the subject in exciting projects and initiatives, e.g., in the field of ambient assisted living (universAAL, openAAL), adaptive user interfaces for users with special needs (myUI), or supporting learning at the workplace (MIRROR). The key challenge here is not making systems context-aware, but actually detecting the context.

The MATURE paper on the findings on knowledge maturing activities from the interview study has won the STELLAR Stakeholder Distinct Award at ECTEL 2010.

The paper was chosen due to its ubiquity; the work […] can help to address large-scale challenges in the areas of employment, economic success, an organizational competitiveness. Its insights regarding the links between Knowledge Maturing and the practical application of formal education have impressively broad base.  […] It was chosen not only because of an interesting and important topic, but also due to its comprehensible language. The paper was found to be highly relevant to formal education, continuing development, policy making, and ICT/TEL industry. Furthermore, the stakeholder advisory board found it to have high potential with regards to exploitability, scalability, and transferability across Europe, as well as globally. The work described in the paper was evaluated as highly innovative with regards to pedagogical, organizational, and socio-cultural aspects.

(Picture courtesy of Paul de Bra)

Here are the slides:

Today I had the pleasure to chair the MATEL workshop at this year’s edition of the ECTEL conference, which I have organized together with my colleagues Christine Kunzmann, Athanasios Mazarakis, and Simone Braun as well Teresa Holocher from CSI in Vienna and Ulrike Cress from KMRC in Tübingen. The workshop focussed on motivational and affective aspects in TEL. 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).

It was a great workshop with lot of interactivity and true interdisciplinary audience. I had the honour to open the workshop with a keynote talk, setting the theme of the workshop and presenting results from the MATURE project (including work from Christine and Athanasios).

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.

This week, a new EU Integrated Project in the technology-enhanced learning area has started with the kick-off meeting in Saarbrücken: MIRROR (web site not yet online). While taking up results from previous projects (like those we at FZI have been involved in: xDELIA for capturing and exploitating affective state and MATURE on transitioning between individual, community/team, and organizational scope), the project targets especially those employee groups which have so far been neglected in technology enhanced learning because they do not primarily work on a computer at their desktop or with their laptop. This includes occupational groups like nurses or physicians. The most promising form of learning for them is reflection (not only for them as the MATURE study has found out), ranging from an invididual, via the team level up to the organizational level.

We want to support this reflection process through contextualized capturing of learning experiences during everyday work activities, e.g., through mobile apps and sensors capturing affective state and allowing individual to annotate their experiences on entirely personal level. Aggregated experiences can be shared with others to support a group reflection process, the results of which should feed into an organizational reflection and improvement process.

Based on the experiences in MATURE, we are trying to form an interdisciplinary community around the topic of motivational and affective aspects in technology-enhanced learning. Towards that end, we are organizing a workhop (MATEL 2010) at this year’s edition of the ECTEL conference, which takes place in Barcelona, Spain.

We invite contributions from the areas of psychology, sociology, computer science, CSCW, economics, among others.

Beginning of this week, I was together with two of my colleagues at the kick-off of the universAAL project, which is an integrated project in the field of ambient assisted living. It aims at consolidating a common infrastructure for AAL systems based on the results of the FP6 projects SOPRANO, PERSONA, mPOWER, GENESYS, among others. The meeting was very well organized, and the motivation and commitment of the team (among them SINTEF, Fraunhofer IGD, ITACA, Ericsson Nikola Tesla, IBM Research Haifa, ProSyst Software) was very promising. We bring in our recently lauched openAAL platform, an open source middleware for ambient assisted living.

The kick-off took place in Røros, a small town in the mountains of Norway, which is a World Cultural Heritage because it has been shaped by its several hundred years of copper mining. It is a beautiful location, but for most of us this has also represented a new personal record in terms of temperature. We had a small tour to the “smelte” in the evening at –34°C, and even during the day, the temperatures were around -24°C.

Last year, we opened our living lab for ambient assisted living which we have built based on our openAAL infrastructure.

Here is now the video on YouTube: