Publikationen

Within this chapter we first outline the important role learning plays within knowledge work and its impact on productivity. As a theoretical background we introduce the paradigm of Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) which conceptualizes informal learning at the workplace and takes place tightly intertwined with the execution of work tasks. Based on a variety of in-depth knowledge work studies we identify key requirements for the design of work-integrated learning support. Our focus is on providing learning support during the execution of work tasks (instead of beforehand), within the work environment of the user (instead of within a separate learning system), and by repurposing content for learning which was not originally intended for learning (instead of relying on the expensive manual creation of learning material). In order to satisfy these requirements we developed a number of context-aware knowledge services. These services integrate semantic technologies with statistical approaches which perform well in the face of uncertainty. These hybrid knowledge services include the automatic detection of a user’s work task, the ‘inference’ of the user’s competencies based on her past activities, context-aware recommendation of content and colleagues, learning opportunities, etc. A summary of a 3 month in-depth summative workplace evaluation at three testbed sites concludes the chapter.

The Knowledge Maturing Phase Model has been presented as a model aligning knowledge management and organizational learning. The core argument underlying the present paper is that maturing organizational knowhow requires individual and collaborative reflection at work. We present an explorative interview study that analyzes reflection at the workplace in four organizations in different European countries. Our qualitative findings suggest that reflection is not equally self-evident in different settings. A deeper analysis of the findings leads to the hypothesis that different levels of maturity of processes come along with different expectations towards the workers with regard to compliance and flexibility, and to different ways of how learning at work takes place. Furthermore, reflection in situations where the processes are in early maturing phases seems to lead to consolidation of best practice, while reflection in situations where processes are highly standardized may lead to a modification of these standard processes. Therefore, in order to support the maturing of organizational know-how by providing reflection support, one should take into account the degree of standardisation of the processes in the target group.