Henri Pirkkalainen

Social Knowledge Environments

Knowledge management represents a key issue for both information systems’ academics and practitioners, including those who have become disillusioned by actual results that fail to deliver on exaggerated promises and idealistic visions. Social software, a tremendous global success story, has prompted similarly high expectations regarding the ways in which organizations can improve their knowledge handling. But can these expectations be met, whether in academic research or the real world? This article seeks to identify current research trends and gaps, with a focus on social knowledge environments. The proposed research agenda features four focal challenges: semi-permeable organizations, social software in professional work settings, crowd knowledge, and cross-border knowledge management. Three solutions emerge as likely methods to address these challenges: design-oriented solutions, analytical solutions, and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Skill-based scouting of open management content

Already existing open educational resources in management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, access barriers still prevent the full exploitation of this potential. Users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is in most cases not supported. The demonstrator presented in this paper addresses these shortcomings by federating multiple repositories, integrating and enriching their metadata, and employing skill-based search for management related content.

A Barrier Framework for open E-Learning in public administrations

A comprehensive literature review on E-Learning and OER in public administrations.A contextualized Barrier Framework about core barriers in the public sector.Lessons learned to improve implementation and adoption processes of open E-Learning.The relevance of organizational, social and technical barriers in the public sector. E-Learning and openness in education are receiving ever increasing attention in businesses as well as in academia. However, these practices have only to small extent been introduced in public administrations. The study addresses this gap by presenting a literature review on Open Educational Resources OER and E-Learning in the public sector. The main goal of the article is to identify challenges to open E-Learning in public administrations. Experiences will be conceptualized as barriers which need to be considered when introducing open E-Learning systems and programs in administrations. The main outcome is a systematic review of lessons learned, presented as a contextualized Barrier Framework which is suitable to analyze requirements when introducing E-Learning and OER in public administrations.

A novel approach towards skill-based search and services of Open Educational Resources

Ha, K.-H., Niemann, K., Schwertel, U., Holtkamp, P., Pirkkalainen, H., Borner, D. et al (2011). A novel approach towards skill-based search and services of Open Educational Resources. In E. Garcia-Barriocanal, A. Ozturk, & M. C. Okur (Eds.), Metadata and Semantics Research: 5th International Conference MTSR 2011 (pp. 312-323), Izmir, Turkey, October 12-14, 2011. Springer.

The Knowledge Intervention Integration Process: A Process-Oriented View to Enable Global Social Knowledge Management

Process oriented Knowledge Management (pKM) has been a widely discussed approach for KM initiatives. The approach ties business strategy closely to KM by connecting knowledge activities to key business processes. Social Software has been taken up in many domains as an organizational tool for managing knowledge. Up till now, the impact of being globally distributed (organizations and teams) has not been emphasized within the pKM view, nor has been the Social Software approach. The globally distributed, Social Software – supported approach has clear impacts for designing and implementing KM processes in the pKM view. Within this paper the authors clarify these implications with an integrated model for introducing Social Software tools for Knowledge Management and aligning those with KM as well as business processes. Their approach emphasizes on aligning the Social Software activities with KM coordination processes, knowledge-intensive business processes and knowledge activities. The authors’ work also stresses the need to recognize and deal with KM barriers within the coordination processes in order to define and implement appropriate interventions and activities.

Overcoming Cultural Distance in Social OER Environments

Open Educational Resources (OERs) provide opportunities as enabler for societal development but also create new challenges. From the perspective of content providers and educational institutions, particularly cultural and context-related challenges emerge. Even though barriers regarding large-scale adoption of OERs are widely discussed, evidence through empirical work for determining challenges in relation to particular contexts is still rare. Such context-specific barriers generally can jeopardize the acceptance of OERs and in particular, social OER environments. We conducted a large-scale (N=882) cross-European investigation in the school context determining how teachers and learners perceive cultural distance as a barrier against the usage of social OER environments. The findings indicate how nationality and age of the respondents are strong predictors of cultural distance barrier. The study concludes with identification of context-sensitive interventions for overcoming the related barriers. These consequences are vital for OER initiatives and educational institutions for aligning their efforts on OER.

Design Principles for Collaboration Platforms for Open Education

Increasing the current low uptake of Open Education Resources (OER) is a key challenge for researchers and practitioners in the field. User studies have shown that collaboration is a main success factor for successful open educational activities. However, effective collaboration in open educational contexts requires well planned processes and platforms supporting collaboration, in particular in physically distributed settings. We have been investigating the value of such platforms, their main features and user requirements to enable collaboration from immature ideas to completed resources. We used quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect insights from potential users of such collaboration platforms to validate our approach. Based on these insights, we developed a collaboration platform for open education. We validated our platform using observation groups and focus groups to identify the key design principles of powerful collaboration platforms for Open Education. Examples are the need for a simple tool, use of a common terminology, and considering Intellectual Property Rights. In this paper, we present our findings from an initial validation of our collaboration platform and give recommendations towards powerful collaboration platforms for open educational contexts.

Removing the Barriers to Adoption of Social OER Environments

Despite the opportunities and benefits of OER, research and practice has shown how the OER repositories have a hard time in reaching an active user-base. The opportunities of experience exchange and simple feedback mechanisms of social software have been realized for improving the situation and many are basing or transforming their OER offerings towards socially powered environments. Research on social software has shown how knowledge-sharing barriers in online environments are highly culture and context-specific and require proper investigation. It is crucial to study what challenges might arise in such environments and how to overcome them, ensuring a successful uptake. A large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation was initiated in the school context to determine which barriers teachers and learners perceive as critical. The study highlights barriers on cultural distance, showing how those are predicted by nationality and age of the respondents. The paper concludes with recommendations for overcoming those barriers.

The Globalization Competence Assessment Framework: Assessing Globalization Competences in the Information Systems Domain

The goal of this paper is to recommend suitable competence assessment instruments and methods for assessing globalization competence in the Information Systems domain. This is done by matching globalization competences with suitable competence assessment methods. The results of the analysis indicate that the most applicable competence assessment methods for assessing globalization competences in the Information Systems domain are written format assessments especially essays, candidate self-reports, live interactions especially group work, and computer simulations. The validity of the outcome is confirmed through a mixed method of document analysis and expert interviews by analyzing and evaluating the assessment methods of Finnish higher education courses in the Information Systems field. Finally, a preliminary comparison between Finnish and Japanese assessment methods is conducted.

Enhancing the experience of online users of open education

The limited adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) has kicked off the launch of several projects to search for possible solutions. One of these projects is “Open Educational Ideas and Innovations” (OEI2). The goal of this project is to find alternatives for increasing the uptake of OER and facilitating the collaborative development of OER. To enhance the experience of the users of open education, we interviewed twelve educators and researchers from different higher education institutions across Europe focusing on gathering insights about idea sharing experiences. In this paper, we present our key findings based on these interviews and outline some recommendations for our next open educational platform. One of the main principles of our proposal is providing an end-to-end platform that supports educators right from the very beginning to the very end, instead of focusing on the content delivery only. An open education initiative starts with a preliminary idea whose owner shares with the other interested educators who in turn collaborate altogether to sharpen the idea and generate the content so that it becomes suitable for an open educational course.