WALOR - State Of the Art

(also available in PDf format) W3C organized a workshop on the Future of Social Networking in January 2009, hosted in Barcelona by Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and ReadyPeople, in order to bring together industry actors to foster discussion, analyze risks and opportunities of social networking industry, and define plans for the future of the industry, including opportunities of creation of a W3C group to continue the discussion. Roughly half of the papers submitted for consideration at the workshop treated the topic of decentralizing social networks, arguing that forcing users to create accounts and record their data across many of these networks was counter-productive, and prevented the establishment of innovative services. A decentralized architecture for social networks would allow the user to choose how many accounts and profiles she desires, and to use any of these on any social networks which would support the proposed or user-selected features. There was consensus at the workshop that most, if not all, of the technologies needed to create decentralized social networks already exist: FOAF, RDFa, XFN and other microformats, SIOC and Portable Contacts were mentioned for data formats, and OpenID, OAuth, XMPP for interaction protocols. A couple of social data aggregation services were presented, based on FOAF, OpenID and client-side SSL certificates.

"Over 50% of Europeans use the internet daily - but 30% have never used it at all! Moreover, disabled persons face particular difficulties in benefiting fully from new electronic content and services. As ever more daily tasks are carried out online, all our people need enhanced digital skills to participate fully in society. The Digital Agenda tackles this unacceptable digital divide. "

Netvibes is the all-in-one dashboard intelligence platform for real-time social media monitoring, social analytics, brand sentiment, reputation management, team ...

"Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work-in the web browser itself."

"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging)."

use the search tool on that university website (the google search) with the keywords: learning motivation workplace indicator measure impact assessment depending on supplementary needs for references in the proposal, you may find some there.

Preliminary paper by the Recowe FP7 project www.recwowe.eu

"This collective volume on quality of work in the European Union offers a comprehensive analysis on the current situation of the tensions between work and welfare in Europe, with a special emphasis on employment-related issues. The volume tackles a crucial aspect of employment policies, namely the strengthening of the quality dimension in the decisions taken by policy-makers to foster the performance of the labour market and to combine this orientation with the demands of workers for welfare, protection and a better reconciliation of work and family life. Quality of work has been on the agenda of policy-makers, practitioners and academics for the last few years, promoting a wide debate. The book provides a contribution to this debate and takes into consideration a range of issues associated with the analysis of work quality from an innovative perspective. Relevant subtopics including a conceptual and political analysis of work quality, wage differentials and in-work poverty, gender issues or workers' direct and indirect representation in the firm and its relation with work quality are addressed."

"Ways to strengthen the motivation for workplace learning according on the self-determination-theory"

"Recent evidence suggests that curricula based on learning outcomes can increase learner motivation, forge stronger links between theoretical and practical learning, raise participation rates and improve learners' prospects on the labour market. But to ensure success, these curricula need to be carefully designed, delivered and assessed - a process which requires the involvement of key stakeholders and well-trained teachers."

They contributed to CEDEFOP comuntiies. 2 sections on their website could be of interest: - informal learning - Workplace employability. they also have an archive site dealing with learning outcomes (from 2001): http://archive.niace.org.uk/projects/LearningOutcomes/

CEDEFOP Archive 2003 Alan Brown contributed the following written paper on Balancing Formal and Informal Learning and Assessment in Supporting Workplace Learning as a background paper to SEMINAR 4: FORMAL AND NON-FORMAL LEARNING IN THE WORKPLACE in the UK Department of Trade and Industry [DTI] 2003 Skills Seminar Series. Recently, obsession with formal assessment in a number of settings in (vocational) education and training in England has lead to neglect of the role of assessment in encouraging further learning. This neglect applies to the role of assessment of formal and informal learning at work as well as to its role in more formal education settings. As a contrast a range of European experience will be considered in order to put forward the design characteristics of an approach to the assessment of work-related learning that could best support commitments to life-long learning and active knowledge transformation.

The Value of Work project (VOW) is an EU (Leonardo) funded project for recognition and validation of competencies in the banking sector in partnership with employers and trade unions. Web site: http://www.valueofwork.org/ The project is led by the Education and Training Service Centre, Iceland. Other partners in the project are institutes/organisations in five European countries, Cyprus, Denmark, Slovenia, Sweden and UK. The main task is to develop competence standards for the banking sector and methods and tools that can be adopted and piloted in the six partner countries and which can be transferred to other occupations.

Some pdf docs attached on that page can provide references to include in footnotes in the proposal. "At this year's edition of this science-meets-industry event in the area of competence development, MATURE organizes a session on Motivational and Affective Aspects in Knowledge Management and Competence Development. In this session, Verónica Rivera-Pelayo will present approaches to capturing affective state from the MIRROR project, associate partner Josef Hofer-Alfeis presents his experiences on employee motivation, and Christine Kunzmann will present conclusions from the research in MIRROR and MATURE."

CoCreat results in new solutions for promoting creative collaboration in terms of new and innovative learning models based on social media and mobile technology. Creative collaboration is a multidisciplinary process where various problems are explored from novel perspectives and the result of collaboration is not defined beforehand (Sternberg,2006). The main idea is to develop and evaluate collaborative spaces for learners of different ages in order to promote creative collaboration.

"In parallel with the legal analysis, the Commission published an Economic Analysis of the Single Market for an Information Society carried out by the external consultant DIW Econ. The study found that ICT, e-Business and e-Commerce are all tools that can help accelerate economic growth as well as improve European economic integration. For example, ICT infrastructure, skills and usage have resulted in a statistically significant increase in cross-border trade flows among European countries. Additionally, the variation in prices was much lower for countries that have implemented the Euro, signalling that the idea of the Single Market can be found in an electronic internet form as well. However, EU Member States are not at the same level of ICT infrastructure and e-Business and e-Commerce usage. While many countries can compete on the world stage, other countries lag far behind which leaves room for further government support. Moreover, even in countries with high levels of infrastructure and usage, much government work can be done to further foster the climate needed for a more comprehensive information society. This work requires policy initiatives to create the correct institutional and legal frame conditions that allow ICT and e-Business to thrive. The study proposes a new policy outlook for the information society."

"Using technology to improve workforce collaboration"