Publikationen

Is Web 2.0 just hype or just a buzzword, which might disappear in the near future? One way to find answers to these questions is to investigate the actual benefit of the Web 2.0 for real use cases. Within this contribution we study a very special aspect of the Web 2.0 ? the folksonomy ? and its use within self-directed learning. Guided by conceptual principles of emergent computing we point out methods, which might be able to let semantics emerge from folksonomies and discuss the effect of the results in self-directed learning.

Purpose: The purpose of this contribution is to motivate a new, rapid approachto modeling knowledge work in organizational settings and to introducea software tool that demonstrates the viability of the envisioned concept.Approach: Based on existing modeling structures, the KnowFlowr Toolsetthat aids knowledge analysts in rapidly conducting interviews and in conductingmulti-perspective analysis of organizational knowledge work is introduced.Findings: It is demonstrated how rapid knowledge work visualization can beconducted largely without human modelers by developing an interview structurethat allows for self-service interviews. Two application scenarios illustrate thepressing need for and the potentials of rapid knowledge work visualizations inorganizational settings.Research Implications: The efforts necessary for traditional modeling approachesin the area of knowledge management are often prohibitive. Thiscontribution argues that future research needs to take economical constraintsof organizational settings into account in order to be able to realize the fullpotential of knowledge work management.Practical Implications: This work picks up a problem identified in practiceand proposes the novel concept of rapid knowledge work visualization for makingknowledge work modeling in organizations more feasible.Value: This work develops a vision of rapid knowledge work visualization andintroduces a tool-supported approach that addresses some of the identified challenges.

While there is a lot of hype around various concepts associated with the term Web 2.0 in industry, little academic research has so far been conducted on the implications of this new approach for the domain of education. Much of what goes by the name of Web 2.0 can, in fact, be regarded as new kinds of learning technologies, and can be utilised as such. This paper explains the background of Web 2.0, investigates the implications for knowledge transfer in general, and then discusses its particular use in eLearning contexts with the help of short scenarios. The main challenge in the future will be to maintain essential Web 2.0 attributes, such as trust, openness, voluntariness and self-organisation, when applying Web 2.0 tools in institutional contexts.

The prediction of time series is an important task in finance, economy, object tracking, state estimation and robotics. Prediction is in general either based on a well-known mathematical description of the system behind the time series or learned from previously collected time series. In this work we introduce a novel approach to learn predictions of real world time series like object trajectories in robotics. In a sequence of experiments we evaluate whether a liquid state machine in combination with a supervised learning algorithm can be used to predict ball trajectories with input data coming from a video camera mounted on a robot participating in the RoboCup. The pre-processed video data is fed into a recurrent spiking neural network. Connections to some output neurons are trained by linear regression to predict the position of a ball in various time steps ahead. The main advantages of this approach are that due to the nonlinear projection of the input data to a high-dimensional space simple learning algorithms can be used, that the liquid state machine provides temporal memory capabilities and that this kind of computation appears biologically more plausible than conventional methods for prediction. Our results support the idea that learning with a liquid state machine is a generic powerful tool for prediction.

Any software development project is based on assumptions about the state of the world that probably will hold when it is fielded. Investigating whether they are true can be seen as an important task. This paper describes how an empirical investigation was designed and conducted for the EU funded APOSDLE project. This project aims at supporting informal learning during work. Four basic assumptions are derived from the project plan and subsequently investigated in a two-phase study using several methods, including workplace observations and a survey. The results show that most of the assumptions are valid in the current work context of knowledge workers. In addition more specific suggestions for the design of the prospective APOSDLE application could be derived. Though requiring a substantial effort, carrying out studies like this can be seen as important for longer term software development projects.