Learntec 2012 was a surprising success for MATURE. Both the knowledge maturing model and the tools, especially the people tagging solution, has attracted considerable interest by fair visitors. MATURE has been able to show well-grounded and practically relevant approaches to knowledge management and learning that set a refreshing antipole to many products and services offered by other exhibitors: while these solutions often appear to be stuck in the last decade, the discussions and reactions from visitors have shown that MATURE has been able to incorporate the lessons learnt from previous approaches.

Just had a surprisingly engaging visit to Shoreditch Accelerator #AccTheDuke & Learning Technology Research Institute #LTRI by HRH the Duke of York, Prince Andrew. I made a 2 minute elevator pitch for #mature-ip http://slidesha.re/y9nyqW But wide ranging discussions were had with our Vice-Chancellor looking on. Here is the text of my 2 minute pitch (from a People Tagging perspective):

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.   

John Cook from MATURE & LTRI joined the UK Research Council funded TEL Group visit to UK Government's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) at the Department’s HQ in Westminster. The visit was well received and took place on 3rd November, 2011. Messages put over on the day by John:

• 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