Günter Beham

Recommending Knowledgeable People in a Work-Integrated Learning System

According to studies into learning at work, interpersonal help seeking is the most important strategy of how people acquire knowledge at their workplaces. Finding knowledgeable persons, however, can often be difficult for several reasons. Expert finding systems can support the process of identifying knowledgeable colleagues thus facilitating communication and collaboration within an organization. In order to provide the expert finding functionality, an underlying user model is needed that represents the characteristics of each individual user. In our article we discuss requirements for user models for the workintegrated learning (WIL) situation. Then, we present the APOSDLE People Recommender Service which is based on an underlying domain model, and on the APOSDLE User Model. We describe the APOSDLE People Recommender Service on the basis of the Intuitive Domain Model of expert finding systems, and explain how this service can support interpersonal help seeking at workplaces.

Knowledge Services for Work-Integrated Learning

In order to support work-integrated learning scenarios task- and competency-aware knowledge services are needed. In this paper we introduce three key knowledge services of the APOSDLE system and illustrate how they interact. The context determination daemon observes user interactions and infers the current work task of the user. The user profile service uses the identified work tasks to determine the competences of the user. And finally, the associative retrieval service utilizes both the current work task and the inferred competences to identify relevant (learning) content. All of these knowledge services improve through user feedback.

Providing varying degrees of guidance for work-integrated learning

We present a work-integrated learning (WIL) concept which aims at empowering employees to learn while performing their work tasks. Within three usage scenarios we introduce the APOSDLE environment which embodies the WIL concept and helps knowledge workers move fluidly along the whole spectrum of WIL activities. By doing so, they are experiencing varying degrees of learning guidance: from building awareness, over exposing knowledge structures and contextualizing cooperation, to triggering reflection and systematic competence development. Four key APOSDLE components are responsible for providing this variety of learning guidance. The challenge in their design lies in offering learning guidance without being domain-specific and without relying on manually created learning content. Our three month summative workplace evaluation within three application organizations suggests that learners prefer awarenss building functionalities and descriptive learning guidance and reveals that they benefited from it.

A Socio-technical Approach towards Supporting Intra-organizational Collaboration

Knowledge work in companies is increasingly carried out by teams of knowledge workers. They interact within and between teams with the common goal to acquire, apply, create and share knowledge. In this paper we propose a socio-technical model to support intra-organizational collaboration which specifically takes into account the social and collaborative nature of knowledge work. Our aim is to support in particular the efficiency of collaborative knowledge work processes through an automated recommendation of collaboration partners and collaboration media. We report on the theoretical as well as practical aspects of such a socio-technical model.

iAPOSDLE - an approach to mobile work-integrated learning

This paper introduces iAPOSDLE, a mobile application enabling the use of work-integrated learning services without being limited by location. iAPOSDLE makes use of the APOSDLE WIL system for self-directed work-integrated learning support, and extends its range of application to mobile learning. Core features of iAPOSDLE are described and possible extensions are discussed.