This design study examines and tests some of the key concepts and issues within the large-scale European research project – MATURE (mature-ip.eu) - that is exploring and aiming to realise learning as a process of knowledge maturing in the workplace. We are particularly interested in investigating a contemporary (or Web 2.0 driven) articulation of how ontologies can be acquired, externalised and exploited by a user-community and introduce a new role for learning dialogue - through developing work into ‘dialogue games’. Through combining this flexible ontology development and learning dialogue technology, a range of knowledge maturing services are provided that include: 1. knowledge acquisition; 2. personal knowledge refinement; 3. collaborative knowledge refinement and negotiation of meaning; 4. informal learning; 5. collaborative learning; 6. support for advising and problem solving; 7. reflection and meta-cognition about the domain and its application; 8. re-representing domain knowledge for different audiences and purposes. Or summarising these, arguably, having the potential continuously to develop a personal and community Ontology combined with the means to have a specialised and scaffolded dialogue about it, will potentially make the domain more understandable and the application of the ontology more powerful.

This approach has been initially validated against a hypothetical and yet authentic user scenario, or ‘thought experiment’, that is grounded on the currently available ontology development (SOBOLEO) and learning dialogue (InterLoc) web-technologies (Ravenscroft et al., 2008). This demonstrated how these technologies could be integrated, or ‘mashed up’, to improve the management, understanding and application of labour market information in the context of careers advice. This initial work also considered the potential role of m-learning techniques and the implications about context that these give rise to. Following this initial and successful validation, ongoing work is implementing the proposed knowledge maturing dialogue game (KM-DG) through loosely coupling SOBOLEO and InterLoc, and then further closer coupling (i.e. involving greater exchange of data) in evolutionary design phases involving users. These users include the developing user communities using both SOBOLEO and InterLoc and MATURE Application Partners who are performing the relevant knowledge maturing processes, such as those described above.
 

References and further information

A. Ravenscroft, S. Braun, J. Cook, A. Schmidt, J. Bimrose, A. Brown & C. Bradley. (2008). Ontologies, Dialogue and Knowledge Maturing: Towards a Mashup and Design Study, Proceedings of International Workshop on Learning in Enterprise 2.0 and Beyond (LEB 08), European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 2008, Maastricht, Netherlands, 16-19 September 2008.

Digital Dialogue Game Web-site - www.interloc.org