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The project will particularly focus on informal learning."It has been known
for a long time that most learning that happens at the workplace is
informal in nature", says Tobias Ley, Professor at the Institute of
Informatics at Tallinn University and scientific coordinator of the
project, "but if we look at the learning technologies that are employed
today, then most follow a very traditional model that mirrors course-based
classroom learning."At the same time, mobile and social information and
communication technologies have entered all parts of our lives. Nowadays we
use them naturally to keep in contact with our friends, to seek
information, to buy things and to work. There is now a realization that
these emerging technologies are a key enabler to refocus efforts on
informal learning, but few companies have taken these technologies up in a
systematic way to include them into their learning strategy.So why is this?
"One of the reasons is that, although informal interactions, like asking
your colleague across the room for help, are very effective, they don’t
scale very well beyond the immediate context", says Tobias Ley. While the
help is effective, not many others can benefit from it. Could our personal
technologies provide a key for scaling up these interactions? This is what
the project has set out to discover, and a number of technological
solutions will be developed that should help to make this endeavor a
reality. First of all, technologies need to be where informal learning
really takes place. "In many prior projects, we have concentrated on people
sitting at their computer desktops. In contrast, the Learning Layers
Project will look at workplaces that are inherently mobile," says Stefanie
Lindstaedt, Professor at Graz University of Technology in Austria, who will
be one of the main project partners for developing technologies for these
settings.The European Commission has specifically asked for proposals that
benefit Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in sectors that have been less
inclined in the past to take up technologies for learning. The Learning
Layers project has therefore selected two very challenging application
areas, the building and construction industry and the healthcare sector.
Informal learning has traditionally played an important role in these
sectors, but both have been hesitant to embrace learning technologies for
different reasons. "With people using their personal devices, we now see a
great opportunity in the building industry to connect our course offering
much more directly with what people are experiencing at the workplace",
says Melanie Campbell who is representing a regional training center for
the building and construction industry in Northern Germany. "Doctors work
in multiprofessional teams and have often learned from colleagues,
technology could provide us with a way of sharing, enhancing and recording
this informal learning", says Tamsin Treasure-Jones from the Leeds
Institute of Medical Education at the University of Leeds."Understanding
the current situation in these two sectors, how they work, learn and share
their knowledge, is a key priority in the project", says Ronald Maier,
Professor at the University of Innsbruck, "we will therefore conduct
in-depth studies and use our findings to help improve the way people work
and learn."Based on these insights, the project will design interaction
technologies to ensure that they are firmly embedded in the daily work
practices, and to create new knowledge, learning and work practices that
fit to the existing ones.Apart from direct person to person interactions,
such as asking colleagues, the Learning Layers project will also look at
how learning materials are created informally and then increasingly shared,
improved and used on a wider scale. And because people’s experiences with
physical objects, like machines or materials, is crucial in the two
sectors, the project will also consider how these experiences can be better
exploited for learning purposes. For example, it is nowadays quite easy to
make short video sequences and share them to explain how to use a certain
tool."In order to scale up the use of these technologies, we really need to
show take up in large user groups", says Graham Attwell, Director of
Pontydysgu and responsible for the project’s outreach strategy. One of
the key measures the project will take is to make use of existing regional
economic clusters in which enterprises are already collaborating on a whole
range of activities. The project has proposed a roll-out strategy through
which technologies would become part of the regional innovation and
learning system, thereby reaching out to 1000 end users within the lifetime
of the project.The project proposal has convinced the EU to fund this
initiative for the next four years, and in fact the proposal was ranked at
the top of its call. The Learning Layers project started on 01 November
2012 with a total budget of over 12 mio. Euros. Seventeen partners from
Austria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Norway, Spain, and the UK have teamed
up for what will be an intense research collaboration. The project is
jointly coordinated by Tallinn University and CIMNE, a research institute
in Barcelona/Spain. An additional Estonian Partner is NORTAL.For further
information please visit the project homepage or contact:Tobias
LeyProfessorTallinn University Institute of InformaticsPhone: +372 640
9355E-mail: tley@tlu.ee