SIMPLE - Social Interactive Mashup PLE

Quality assurance is a key aspect for the acceptance of agile bottom-up processes for content development (which are highly beneficial to knowledge maturing). MATURE explores community-driven quality assurance within the context of career guidance organizations. Users need to have confidence that a document is appropriate for a particular context, including their current task and profile. The organization, on the other hand, is interested in tracking, assuring and contributing to the quality of artefacts and processes. This is achieved by providing (i) indicators for quality assurance, (ii) access to an overview of the knowledge base, and (iii) possibilities for gardening the knowledge base.

The focus of our work is on the informal side of work-integrated learning, specifically covering work processes of knowledge workers with learning as a by-product (Eraut, 2007). This enables a shift from the training perspective of the organisation to the learning perspective of the individual.

Furthermore, efficiency is a key goal of an organisation, which, as in this case, relates to the better reuse of existing knowledge and strives for collaborative improvement of the quality of already existing knowledge. In this respect we mainly focus on:

• how to share knowledge artefacts with others
• how to collect relevant knowledge artefacts for later use
• how to stay up to date on certain topics that are of a knowledge worker's interest
• how knowledge workers can collaboratively support improving and highlighting the quality by rating and gardening of shared knowledge spaces and
• how to provide the knowledge worker with adequate information about the relevance of a knowledge artefact in her current work task.
• how to collaborate with colleagues in order to solve tasks at hand

The objective of SIMPLE is to actively support higher quality of knowledge work and to foster informal learning. By means of this software we provide new ways how to support the collaborative creation of high quality and reliable content-based knowledge artefacts in a self-organised way. The main focus of SIMPLE is on the first four phases of the knowledge maturing model.

SIMPLE is based on a widget approach especially for supporting work-integrated learning based on a concrete use case. It is designed to combine web based information access and desktop integration for a seamless integration into the familiar work environment of the user. An underlying communication infrastructure allows for exchanging data and events between widgets in order to improve workflows and usability, and avoid media disruptions.

The main desktop application is called Activity Based Sidebar, which needs to be installed on the target machine. It is an Adobe AIR application, which runs in the according runtime environment. It provides an application which enables knowledge workers to create their learning and maturing environment independently and contextually fitting. Moreover, the prefix Activity Based refers to the possibility users have, to classify and group a subset of their used widgets into activities according to individual tasks. Widgets are deployed in a web-based widget repository. The sidebar loads the widgets in a list of all widgets as selected by the user.

Initially, we provide 6 widgets and the matureFox Firefox plugin. These are:

• Collection Widget
• Tagging Widget
• Tag Cloud Widget
• Search Widget
• Discussions Widget
• Tag Editor Widget

We have recorded some explaining screencasts, guiding you through the main ideas, principles and functionality of the software.

Flyer

Related publications

2010

2009