participatory design and ethnographic studies May 23, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so fartwo days ago I attended a talk of Prof. Ina Wagner from the Institute of Design & Assessment of Technology of the Technical University Vienna. The Working Life Research Centre FORBA had invited her to talk about her ethnographic studies that she and her team are undertaking in the context of technology development.
The talk gave some insights into the complexity of such ethnographic studies and especially in the efforts that it takes to feed the results into design requirements.
Apart from the interesting talk that included a lot of references for further reading as well as some examples from practices there were 2 aspects that I found very interesting and also very relevant for the work that we are doing in our European R&D projects.
First of all, Ina Wagner presented one case in which they observed the working practices in 3 different hospitals with the final goal of implementing a common patient information management system for all three hospitals. At the end of the ethnographic studies it was decided that the system was not going to be built. The work practices were just too different.
Now if I think in the context of an R&D project, e.g. in the ICT programme of FP7, I have never come across a project so far that would have said after the first phase of requirements analysis that the project as such does not make sense. I have, however, not even seen any project that does some real intensive ethnographic studies before starting the implementation phase. Rather on the contrary, just too many times I have come across projects/proposals with only some “pro forma” user requirements elicitation that do not really include a in depth analysis of the actual context, neither during the design phase nor during the assessment.
The second interesting aspect that was addressed by someone from the audience is related to the current practices of ethnography and how this is already applied by technology providers, e.g. ICT industry. With the exception of very few big players, it seems that similar to many R&D projects driven by academia, industrial development is not yet applying these participatory practices.
In our latest proposal for an ICT project (that deals with the facilitation of work practices in the Creative Industries via ICT) we included ethnographic studies at the very beginning of the project, combined with some other methods of participatory design. Would be great if we could work on this project in the future. We will see if we make it to the list of funded projects….
Tags: ethnography, R&D
How many blogs can we handle? May 9, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentI am currently blogging work-related issues mainly at our unit’s weblog. And then, if it is specifically related to my project work, I post things directly on iCamp. Although, I must say, the project weblog is currently more used as an announcement tool and does not really go very much into much reflections.
This means that I am not blogging a lot here at my personal weblog. I still try to distinguish between my personal comments and thoughts (expressed here), those related to our unit work and those related to the project work.
Seems that currently there is not much time left for the personal part, but we will see….
I also must confess that I have not been a very passionate blogger so far, but since we started to blog as a group (the ZSI Technology and Knowledge Unit) I do feel more motivated. Maybe my psychologist colleges (who are becoming more and more) will do a motivational analysis on this one day 
self-directing competence development in Higher Education April 23, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so farYesterday I was attending a talk by Kai Pata from Talllinn University at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. The title of the talk was: Designing E-Learning Experiences for Soft Competence Acquisition.
After the approx. 1 hour presentation (which by the way also included some insights into the recent iCamp field trials) a short discussion followed around the appropriateness of certain technological landscapes for specific professional skills teaching.
One of the questions brought forward was about the importance of teaching of competencies such as self-directing or collaboration – apart from factual knowledge and professional skills – at Higher University.
I think that this is a very important issue that Higher Education institutions (HEI) should dedicate more attention to. Although I am not working at any HEI I do have the feeling that it is currently the individual lecturer who decides how much he/she would like to support the advancement of students self-directing competencies, apart from the pure “content” teaching.
Challenging situations have to be created, students need to be able to experiment, but they also might need some guidance and scaffolds from the more experienced. This might be a challenge not only for the students but also for a lot of teachers, who may learn something as well during the process. This requires a certain attitude and openness from all sides.
Would be interesting to see how HEI have this competence development anchored in their teaching strategies.
PROLEARN final review February 28, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commenttime is running really fast. I am sitting here today with a bunch of colleges that I have been “glued” together in the last 4 years via a Network of Excellence called PROLEARN.
It is the final review. So in two days (yesterday and today) we are running through hundreds and hundreds of slides, we postpone the interesting discussions usually to a later point in time and then we run out of time and so on.
This is the way these reviews are usually done. Five external experts plus one representative from the European Commission have been reading through hundreds and hundreds of pages of “Deliverables” before coming to this event. The more than 30 people from our research network sitting around in this room have produced these documents during the last year. Then, as said, we present this work again in slideshows that are always too long and our attention level goes down (at least mine does) and when we arrive at the really interesting discussions we are postponing them.
So is there another way of doing this?
Some thoughts: what about reviewers sending their main questions and concerns in advance to the consortium and then we could address those and go earlier into the discussions? Reviews are about bringing constructive criticism to the network/project. So I think that we should arrange these reviews more in a discussion like manner. Less presentations, more interaction with the reviewers and a more constructive discourse. Just as we are talking about new pedagogical approaches in TEL we should consider new approaches to reviews. Moving away from this old-fashioned “exam” situation we should think of ways to implement “review 2.0″.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: Prolearn, Network of Excellence
Going Solo: a conference for freelancers January 31, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentOne of our current interest at the ZSI is to look into working practices of the Creative Industries and there especially at the small businesses, part of the digital boheme, so to day.
Now I saw Ton posting about a conference that is especially dedicated to freelancers who work with a network of peers over the Internet. Sounds like an interesting event!
Going Solo
What happened to andragogy? January 16, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized,andragogy , add a commentI am just coming back from a meeting where a number of people doing research in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) were discussing what might be some of the core research topics in TEL for the next few years.
What stroke me in one of the discussions is that quite many people think about teaching kids and young people when we talk about pedagogy. And of course if we take the Greek root of the term “pedagogy” it means “child-leading”.
However in TEL we also deal a lot with settings of Life Long Learning, workplace learning, vocational training, etc. where we are confronted with an adult learner perspective. Now some of us also use the term pedagogy in that context as the term has somewhat been extended to “guiding and leading” all sorts of target groups.
But there has been the term and concept of “andragogy” (“adult-leading”) around for many years now. I was just wandering why this term has not really found its way into the TEL community yet? Or is it around and I have just missed it?
It was mainly Malcom Knowles, who defined some theory around this term in order to describe some of the main differences between guiding children in their learning processes and guiding adults. Knowles came up with 4 basic principles:
- Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction (Self-concept and Motivation to learn).
- Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities (Experience).
- Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life (Readiness to learn).
- Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented (Orientation to learning).
Although I suppose that quite a lot of researchers in TEL do consider at least part of these 4 principles I have come across this term very rarely. It makes us aware that when we are dealing with adult learners the challenges for designing learning activities are very different from pedagogical scenarios for children.
So why not use the term more widely again?
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Tags: andragogy, adult education, pedagogy, TEL
some artwork January 9, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentyesterday I was at an exhibition of the painter Max Holzapfel who comes from the same little village where I come from. He used to be a teacher for secondary school before dedicating his time 100% to his art.
Whenever I go to an exhibition and especially if I see a painting that I like I remember some of my own paintings. So I uploaded a few picture from my paintings to FlickR. Here is one of them (this one hangs in my kitchen btw)
Blogged with Flock
iCamp made a good finish for 2007 January 7, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentJust before the Christmas holidays we had the second EC review of our iCamp project. Same procedure as every year: independent experts get all the documents (deliverables) from the project that were produced during the year; they spend some sleepless nights before the review to go through all the papers (sorry again for submitting some rather long deliverables ), and have a look at what is otherwise available in terms of prototype etc. and then we all meet and do some ppts to show the work; finally and luckily we also have some discussions;
It is really good to get the opinion of individuals who are not directly involved in the work, but who are experts on the subject and deal with similar questions.
And this time it has been especially pleasant as we have been congratulated on our good work. This review has been a nice finish for 2007 and it should be a good start for 2008.
One of the recommendations has been to improve our dissemination strategy and to spread the word about the nice things that we do in our project. So I hope that we will get together with some key people following similar approaches (e.g. the PLE approach) and join forces.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: icampple
LLL in Austria December 15, 2007
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentOn Monday the Austrian Ministry for Education, Art and Culture organised a day of public consulting for the Austrian Life Long Learning Strategy.
Me and some of my colleges attended this event. Probably each of us with different expectations, but in the end we all had the same feeling. Informal learning and the recognition of competences that have been acquired in informal or non-formal settings is a popular topic in the current LLL discussions. However, when I hear the talks and follow the developments that are currently taking place for establishing the EQF (European Qualification Framework) and the corresponding national frameworks I have my doubts if this praise for informal learning is taken seriously by the different stakeholders.
by the way, one very refreshing talk was given by Rolf Arnold from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (Germany) about competence development and LLL in a knowledge based society. Arnold was focusing on some core competences such as self-organisation or collaboration (by the way, our pedagogical concept in iCamp is also focusing on the advancement of these competences) and what it means for educational policies and practices if we want to bring these competences forward. A core question is how far are the different players open for a process of change and self-reflection.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: LLL, competence
flock testing again November 20, 2007
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a comment
Blogged with Flock
Tags: test, flock, youtube, music video