News Story

International Joint Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning EC-TEL and Knowledge Technologies and data-driven Business I-KNOW

Chris Valentine, Wednesday 3 Dec 2014

KMi had an impressive participation in the EC-TEL and I-KNOW conferences including eleven KMi researchers responsible for six presentations and four papers. This joint event took place in Graz, Austria, September 16-19, 2014. The key themes were open learning and teaching in educational communities as well as the integration of data-centric and user-centric approaches.

In EC-TEL: Fridolin Wild, Alex Mikroyannidis and Thomas Ulmann coordinated the workshops on “Awareness and reflection in technology enhanced learning”. Annika Wolff and Paul Mulholland presented “Cultural learning across the Smart City” in the Smart City Learning workshop.

During the conference, Fridolin Wild presented “An augmented reality job performance aid for kinaesthetic learning in manufacturing work places” with Peter Scott. Ale Okada presented two papers in EC-TEL “Reliability of web-based information in inquiry projects” with Andre Correia and Cintia Rabello and I-KNOW “Social, open and personalised environments for communication and knowledge management between business and educational organisations” with Renata Colonego and Roberto Serra.

KMI made a special contribution towards two innovative research papers “developed by end users” about the weSPOT European project. Andre Correia, a PhD student and a Biology teacher , developed a pilot study on “Biodiversity in Gardens” in weSPOT with his group from UNESP University and Bauru School in Sao Paulo. Renata Calonego, an undergraduate on Business Management and the youngest KMi visitor, developed a pilot study on the “Food and Health” project coordinated by NESTLE enterprise with schools in Brazil. Both researchers were the first users to complete a pilot in weSPOT and write a research paper with contributions from their colleagues and great feedback from reviewers.

The integration of both conferences held at Messe Congress Graz offered thought-provoking and rich opportunities to think and talk to colleagues from Knowledge Management and Education fields. Interesting common themes were discussed by keynotes on Big Data, Design Thinking and Open Learning and Teaching.

Etienne Wenger opened the event with an inspiring keynote on “Open learning and teaching: perspectives from social learning theory". He emphasised that the 21st century is going to be the century of identity. The process of forming, transforming and developing individual and collective identities has become increasingly important through landscapes of knowledge and competences in the community.

“Learning is often viewed as something individuals do as they acquire information and skills. It is usually associated with some form of instruction. … Learning is also an inherent dimension of everyday life and that it is fundamentally a social process… Learning is not merely the acquisition of a curriculum, but a journey across a landscape of practice, which is transformative of the self… From this perspective, a living “body of knowledge” can be viewed as a collection of communities of practice… Achieving a high level of “knowledgeability” is a matter of negotiating a productive identity with respect to the various practices that constitute this landscape. Education is then a guided tour of the various practices that constitute this landscape. Teaching is one of these practices, located like all others in a complex landscape, but with the additional twist that it has to prepare students for their own trajectory through landscapes of practice.” Wenger(2014)

This is what KMi is doing: expanding knowledgeable communities of practices with its visitors and young students.