Work & Learning Partners

The London workshop of the WLP project provided a clear evidence that the project could concetrate on its work at the eve of the summer holidays. The workshop took note of the developmental phase that had been carried out with the help of blogging and related exchanges of information (the exchanges of ideas on the WLP web and on the national piloting agendas). Equally, the workshop made decisions concerning the work to be carried out during the Autumn months.

In this context I try to draw attention to some points in which the London workshop made clear progress and became a collective learning experience:

1) The original project plans had created an impression of relatively uniform piloting phase with similar partnership arrangements. The experience during the project implementation had brought into picture the different possibilities for actual piloting, for preparatory measures and for transfer-promoting measures after earlier pilot phases.
2) The demonstration of the newer tools for social bookmarking and social networking (with the help of del.icio.us) opened new prospects for linking work with knowledge resources to development of work-related learning arrangements and to respective design of learning contents.
3) The WLP partners could contribute (to a greater extent than expected) to the production of WLP Multimedia resources and the editing of such materials could be linked closer to the project development.
4) The WLP Manual would be more useful as a brief (electronic and printable) introductory document that points to the WLP knowledge resources that are made available on the web.
5) The WLP Web can be used as an umbrella concept for diferent web resources and services provided by the WLP project.
6) The WLP Course could best be developed as a tutorial service area that supports the use of the resources and services of the WLP project. However, the WLP course should provide support for implementing such learning arrangements as courses.
7) The final efforts of the WLP partners should concentrate on supporting the whole development of the WLP project in such areas of work in which they can best contribute. However, the final activities of the partners should be seen as part of a (national or trans-national) piloting agenda.

Regarding the above mentioned points the project team could reach common conclusions and take some decisions how ro organise the work with multimedia resources. Yet, in some respects the outcome of the London discussion left open questions to be responded in the next phase:
a) How can the steps towards a project-specific light-weight Learning Management System (in the meantime called as "KLearn") be linked to the conclusions that were drawn in London?
b) How can some partners' efforts to develop networked learning arrangements in a regional context be best supported and documented ?
c) How can the partners' efforts to disseminate each others' work best be supported by the project?

These questions could not be directly answered on the basis of the London conclusions. To some extent these have been  processed further with bilateral tals  and related exchanges. At the moment it seems that it is possible to take some further measures that help the project to link different activities together.

I believe that this is enough at the moment. In the next posting I will present some proposals that respond to these open questions and complete the London conclusions.

Pekka Kämäräinen