WLP Piloting and Reporting

My first observation is that Al declares the readiness of the KnowNet to start a closer cooperation with the WLP partners to promote customisation of the website and the related country-specific work processes. (To me this is all fine.) Secondly  he invites the WLP partners to familiarise themselves with the content management interfaces and the blogging interfaces which KnowNet has developed. (This, also is an appropriate appeal although we may not be quite sure what he exactly wishes us to look at.) Then, he continues to his offer for coaching and tutoring how to use these facilities.

At this point I can hear a referee blowing his whistle for Al due to an offside position (even though we are not at a football field). As far as I am concerned (and now I am speaking as a German partner) we cannot start the discussion on customisation from the ideas that Al floats upon us on blogging and online tutoring without addressing the work we should be doing for the project. However, if we start addressing our needs from the perspective of our concerns and tasks in the project we are in a better position to develop WLP Web facilities to meet the needs of the WLP project partners.

In my prior postings I have tried to outline tasks in general concepts that make the different piloting agendas comparable with each other. Now I try to respond to my own instructions and proposals as a partner with country-specific concerns and tasks.

From the German perspective the theme "workplace learning parnerships" is covered by a chain of pilot projects that date back to the early 1990s and represent different phases of educational and societal innovation policies. Normally, the German innovation policies have required an accompanying research project when the innovations are based on public-private partnerships and on combination of different funds. However, even if these accompanying research projects have been well thought (in terms of suporting the innovation processes) the reports have hardly managed to pave the way for broad-based dissemination of innovative practice. Instead, there is an information overkill regarding documentary information and a lack of shared learning on the basis of project histories. This is somewhat alarming when the innovation policies and the VET policies are going through a rupure period.

Given this background I see two kinds of tasks for the German contributions to the WLP Web 'Resource Areas':
a) On the one hand there is a need to raise awareness of the organisational knowledge on partnership cooperation that is 'out there' (in the project-related know-how on teamworking, learning designs and in the reports that document the processes).
b) On the other hand there is a need to raise awareness of the experiential learning (e.g. overcoming communication barriers, finding new ways to cooperate, putting joint ideas into practice) that has taken place in the projects.

In this respect I have started to work with 'case stories' that try to give a more living (but at the same time analytical and critical) picture of the project histories. Please find as an attachment the first pilot version of case story on the GoLo project. As I see it now, I would need for the German WLP Web testing area an architecture that allows me to to store such case stories to a container area that portrays the cases as clusters of inputs. (I would hope that there is a possibility to produce similar case stories for the GAPA project and for the successor activities).

On the other hand I have started a cooperation with some German students who have to work on reporting and supervision of workplace learning (based on their own experience as trainers). For this cooperation I would need another container area that links the students to a common learning process.

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Having said all that I have to emphasise that I see the need to develop the 'Resource Areas' or the 'container areas' in such a way that the inputs or the clusters can be viewed as parallel neighbourhoods. This, to me was a key feature in the old REM resource environment for European VET research and of the Cedefop Resource Base for "ICT and VET". To me the current blog-based knowledge resources appear as one-lane-streets without much support for the layman user who wants to move sideways wehile searching and lurking. (I know that Al would oppose and refer to the role 'categories', 'tags' and 'bookmarks' but these already require the knowledge what to search and how to search.) In the light of the above I have special wishes for the architecture of the 'Resource Areas' that I would want to develop as a part of the German WLP Web Testing Area. In a similar way I would expect that the Italian partners would like to see 'Resource Areas' as container areas for storing and developing knowledge resources for the two content areas in which they want top promote web-supported workplace learning. And equally, I believe that the Slovenian partners would like to see their different arenas for workplace learning clustered but within a common framework - not as atomistic blog entries or parallel stringsof blogs with random hits by categories and bookmarks. Thus, my plead is for stronger support for connectivity, cross fertilisation and knowledge enrichment by the website architecture. I guess this was enough of the first point. I will continue with some thoughts on the 'supporting areas' (second posting) and on the KLearn instrument (third posting). Pekka Kämäräinen