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Ronald Maier and Andreas Schmidt together with Christine Kunzmann organized the special track Social Knowledge Management at I-KNOW 2015. With the advent of social media, knowledge manage­ment had to rethink its conceptual foundations on how knowledge develops on a collective level.

Andreas Schmidt opened the session with a look back on how the field has evolved. Ten years ago, at I-KNOW 2005, the very first version of the knowledge maturing model was presented, aiming at integrating diverse perspectives on knowledge, and since then, numerous cross-disciplinary research activities have contributed to the extension and refinement of the model. At the heart is the insight that knowledge develops along distinct phases in which its characteristics and thus requirements for support change. It brings to­gether different perspectives and provides a frame­work for analysis and design of interventions.

Together with Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt continued to present recent research from the EmployID project. It concentrated on the use of patterns as structured description of experiential knowledge intended for reuse. They presented a tool-chain in which socio-technical patterns can be developed from peer coaching activities in which eliciting of motivational and affective aspects becomes possible, via a collaborative editing system Living Documents to social learning programmes to disseminate to and engage with a wider audience.

The expanded influence of ICT has been a key development over the past 30 years and looks set to dominate labour market changes in the foreseeable future. In parallel, modern employment and careers service delivery has become fundamentally IT-dependent, because of the profound changes evident to the methods of recruitment and job search.

As part of the symposium on Integrating ICT in employment and career practice: opportunities and challenges, Alan Brown, Jenny Bimrose & Deirdre Hughes presented a contribution that explored the impact of ICT on employment and careers work, some challenges and emerging opportunities. The validity of socially constructed knowledge and the influence on the training of employment and career practitioners were explored, through the use of closed private on-line learning programmes (using a MOOC learning platform) to support the continuing professional development and identity transformation of staff in public employment agencies in Europe. 

 

EmployID member Barbara Gogala (ZRSZ) attended at ANSE Summer University in Zadar, Croatia from 17^th to 21^st August 2015. The summer universities topic was “Supervision - Guiding Lights for Development in Times of Crisis”.

Summer University was organized by Croatian Association for Supervision in cooperation with ANSE. Plenary lectures focused on the impact on crisis to professionals offering supervision mostly in social field. The workshops were more diverse, showing some creative methods, tackling diversity, evaluation process, secondary traumatization…  Attention was paid to the results and learning outcomes of International intervision processes that have been going on among ANSE members for more than 15 years now.

On 18^th August 2015 Barbara Gogala (ZRSZ) and Carmen Wolf (KIT) held a workshop together on “Tackling the challenges of employment counsellors with technology-enhanced Peer Coaching”. Barbara was there face-to-face as presenter and Carmen was connected via Skype. This technical challenges was an opportunity to try out another way of presenting material remote. The workshop was on the challenges the PES face and how EmployID is tackling these with Technology-Enhanced Peer Coaching/ Online Peer Coaching. Current works on concept, training and tools were presented and afterwards the advantages and disadvantages of doing peer coaching online were discussed. Advantages that were seen in Online Peer Coaching were: It might be better for some people to express themselves since they are able to take their time (“slow down – think first – write down”), social media is too unprofessional to use for the professional context, it is a part of nowadays society world (new media) and it should be seen as another tool for coaching instead of a concurrent method or approach. Disadvantages that were mentioned was the influence of sound (if with audio), missing contact and therefore the missing emotional connectivity. The question was raised, if persons using the peer coaching know each other before and blended-learning approaches were suggested so that people better understand each other and their concepts behind written language.

The theoretical concept of coflection was presented for the first time to an external audience at this years EC-TEL Conference in Toledo, Spain. Michael Prilla (RUB) and Carmen Wolf (KIT) first gave a short introduction why this approach is timely according to nowadays workplace learning needs. After this, coaching and reflection were explained separate and main connection as well as differences shown. The coflection concept has three levels: process level, element level and meta-level. These were illustrated and afterwards first prototypes for collaborative reflection (within a EmployID community of practice) and peer coaching revealed. The last minutes of the presentation was about how to interlink the prototypes. For more on this check out the slides or the paper.

Questions were raised about how coflection will be implemented in practice and if peer coaching or coflection provide lower outcome in comparison to individual coaching with a professional coach.

The interactive poster on Augmenting Learning Tools with Reflection Support has won this year's ECTEL's Best Poster Award. It has shown the potential of reflection support as a plugin to other systems to provide reflection opportunities. 

EmployID representatives (Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt, and Carmen Wolf) have organized the sixth edition of the MATEL Workshop series. In this workshop edition, we have concentrated on a pattern-based approach to capturing socio-technical design experiences, an area where EmployID is also concentrated on. The participants were actively discussing opportunities and challenges with patterns. A more detailed summary as well as the contributed papers and presentations are available from the MATEL wiki.

This year’s Joint Technology-Enhanced Learning (JTEL) European Summer School was organized together with Federica Web Learning and the EMMA project (European Multiple MOOC Aggregator) which are both from Università di Napoli Federico ii. The EmployID members, Carmen Wolf from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Oliver Blunk from Ruhr-University of Bochum (RUB) attended in a double-role as PhD candidates and workshop leaders. Graham Attwell and Artemis Travlou from Pontydysgu joined the summer school to lead a workshop on Labour Market information and to exchange research results and ideas around that Learning Analytics and MOOCs.

The main topics of the summer school were MOOCs, Learning Analytics, open data, inquiry based  learning and improving scientific work through workshops on paper writing, reviewing, networking (with social media), presenting or pitching a thesis and project acquisition. It was a very good combination between current research dissemination and soft-skills empowerment for young researchers.

Becoming emotional aware (of your actual emotional state) is a core skill if you want to "own" the ability to select your mental focus you prefer to use when moving towards achieving an objective, communicating your message, driving a group towards an ambitious goal, etc. In this video Pablo Franzo shares the steps to achieve such emotional awareness.