The recently started ICOPER project organized a workshop at the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) on December 4, 2008. The organizers managed to assemble most of the European projects dealing with competencies. The project aims at kicking off and fostering a standardization effort for a semantically enriched standard on competency-related issues, geared towards employability processes. MATURE’s scientific coordinator Andreas Schmidt participated in and contributed to the workshop.

MATURE has started with a high level of activity and motivation of all participants in April 2008 and has so far managed to sustain those high standards. The project work has been organized according to an adapted agile approach in different strands of activities, which have regular synchronization points (every three months, together with consortium meetings). These activities include

On the yearly knowledge management symposion organized by the AKWM Karlsruhe, Andreas Schmidt presented MATURE as one of the key activities in the knowledge management field of the iRegion Karlsruhe. The presentation particularly highlighted the potential of the knowledge maturing approach to overcome the separation of knowledge management and learning.

At this year's ECTEL conference in Maastricht, MATURE took the opportunity to present the results of the first months to the European TEL community.

• Andreas Schmidt organized the Learning in Enterprise 2.0 workshop, which explored the implications of the Enterprise 2.0 movement and ideas to technology-enhanced learning.
  

The I-KNOW conference, which is organized by the Know-Center in Graz is the yearly event for discussing new ideas on knowledge management, and learning support in corporate environments.

As one of the main activities of the first year work in the empirical strand, the ethnographic studies have started. After the pre-study in May by University of Innsbruck at the associate partner GISA, the main studies have now started:

• Synaxon (by University of Paderborn),
• Klinikum Karlsruhe (by FZI),
• Swisscom (by FHNW),
• STRUCTURALIA (by CIMNE),
• and at Connexions KENT (by UWAR and PONT)

All of them are partners or associate partners of MATURE.

The Municipal Hospital Karlsruhe (Klinikum Karlsruhe gGmbH)has joined the MATURE associate partner network and participates in the ethnographic studies in their training department for the nursery domain. The hospital is particulary interested in improving their training processes to accomodate to the changing requirements in the health care sector.

The second MATURE consortium meeting took place at Innsbruck in the beautiful Tyrolean alps, hosted by Ronald Maier and his team. The meeting was characterized by the continuing good spirit of the project team.

On the first day, there was an ethnographers' meeting. With the ethographic studies starting in August, the UIBK team has provided extensive preparation material and their first experiences with a pre-study.

MATURE has supported the Summer School for technology-enhanced learning, organized by the PROLEARN successor EATEL in Ohrid, with speakers and young researchers, working in the disparate fields of expertise which promote the advancement of TEL at the workplace.