3. Developing differentiated strategies for country-specific piloting and dissemination

3.1 Starting points: The original ideas and the initial working concept

As has been indicated, the original idea on the country-specific piloting activities was based on the assumption that the national partners could work with

1. relatively similar local or regional piloting contexts (based on the prior LPA-analyses) and
2. with similar web platforms that would give the national pilot activities a coherent shape.

However, as has been indicated, neither of these conditions was fulfilled when the WLP project reached the respective phase. Concerning the partnership concepts the project had had to revise its approach and take into account a broader range of partnership-oriented cooperation and related settings of workplace learning. As regards the use of web resources, the project had had to find specific ways to incorporate use of web applications (or production of multimedia resources) into the partners’ national activities. In this respect the WLP project had to reach new working agreements on the country-specific piloting and/or dissemination agendas.

3.2 Analysis of the encountered contradictions and needs for reorientation

The above mentioned contradiction provided the basis for discussing the piloting activities of WLP project in the additional workshop in London. The preparatory material took into account the widening of the range of partnership concepts and approaches to networked learning. Also, the preparatory material introduced the differentiation between ‘piloting agendas’, ‘pre-piloting agendas’ and ‘transfer-promoting agendas’. However, at the same time the preparatory material appeared to be pushing a tool-centred approach to pilot with a local ‘KLearn’ application (either at the level of organisational measures or at the level pedagogic support for individual learning). Therefore, the preparatory material was only halfway-successful in opening the piloting agendas for initiatives that the partners could consider well-adjusted to their contexts.

The discussion in the London workshop shifted the emphasis from the possible role of possible common tools to the actual measures with which the partners can best support the development of workplace learning and partnership-based cooperation. This discussion was supported with demonstrations of the role multimedia products that present workplace learning, views on cooperation and stakeholders’ comments on the results of developmental project. Also, this discussion was supported by demonstrations on the use of web services (notably of del.icio.us) in creating resource bases on research materials or learning materials with a focus on workplace learning. In the course of this discussion the national partners could specify their possibilities to promote piloting and/or to organise WLP-related dissemination activities in their national contexts. However, this step of clarification was only halfway-successful regarding the incorporation of these measures into the overarching agenda of the WLP project.

3.3. Remarks on the revision of the working concept

The discussion of the London workshop helped the partners to proceed with their respective piloting and/or dissemination agendas. Also, in the light of the London conclusions it was possible to see that partners with different preconditions for piloting or dissemination activities could create bilateral links (e.g. between piloting in one country and reflective dissemination in another country). However, the London conclusions left it somewhat open, how the revised approach to piloting and dissemination could be linked back to the products and services that the WLP project was preparing.