Right for the LearnTec 2012, we have launched the first version of our knowledge-maturing.com web site that presents the offerings of our project to interested companies and other organizations. It shows our offering in terms of technology solutions (most of which are or will be available as open source), consulting approaches and training offerings as well as publications for the scientific community.

Recently, two journal articles have been accepted after a lengthy reviewing process. They summarize two major areas of contribution of MATURE: iterative and agile design processes/design-based research and agile competence management and ontology maturing.

Simone Braun, Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt
Semantic People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: An Enterprise Social Media Approach to Competence Management
International Journal on Knowledge and Learning

MATURE contributed to the STELLAR (The European Network of Excellence in TEL) Theme Team on “Social Mobile Networking for Informal Learning” (SoMobNet) International Roundtable at the Institute of Education in London on 21st November 2011. Both John Cook and Graham Attwell presented results from the MATURE demonstrators.   

• Feedback can help to prioritize to knowledge maturing activities
• Foster participation in wikis
• A social ranking can even more help to raise awareness for knowledge exchange

MATURE has once again been invited to this year's Professional Training Facts 2011. Christine Kunzmann has organized a session on Motivational and Affective Aspects in Competence Development in joint initiative with the MIRROR project. In this session, Verónica Rivera Pelayo presented approaches to capturing affective state from the MIRROR project, associate partner Josef Hofer-Alfeis presents his experiences on employee motivation, and Christine Kunzmann presented conclusions from the research in MIRROR and MATURE.

• Andreas Schmidt: The Role of Motivational & Affective Aspects: Introduction 
• Josef Hofer-Alfeiss: Improving Employee Motivation and Innovation Performance
• Verónica Rivera Pelayo: Personal Informatics for Capturing Emotions
• Christine Kunzmann: The Role of Motivational & Affective Aspects: Empirical Results and Future Directions

Furthermore Graham Attwell gave an inspiring talk on Mobile Learning: Using Mobiles for Learning, Developing and Sharing Knowledge

In a joint activity with the MIRROR and the IntelLEO projects, MATURE has organized a second edition of the MATEL workshop at this year's ECTEL 2011 in Palermo, Italy.

Based on results from these projects and a discussion with the workshop participants, the following research challenges were identified:

As a result of the work conducted within MATURE, Pontydysgu and the Institute for Employment Research, Warwick University, announce a new web site (CareersTalk), providing access to the ongoing research and development into careers guidance and in particular, the use of new technology to support careers guidance. Much of this work has been also supported by the G8WAY project.

On September 29, 2011, MATURE has invited career guidance decision makers, researchers, and practitioners to Warwick, UK for an interactive demonstration of MATURE tools. Almost 50 participants discussed with the MATURE team on the usefulness and potential of the people tagging demonstrator, the widget-based environment for developing and sharing LMI related content, the LMI visualization tool, and learning and development modules. The participants have been very interested in using the tools, and as part of the plenary discussion, many interesting ideas for further development have come up that the MATURE team will explore further.

The slides and additional material are available from http://mature-ip.eu/event/warwick2011