Roland Klemke

Competency development for Open Management Organizations

2013-02-05T08:54:28Z

I've been asked recently to participate in an online workshop and to talk about open management for a German networking organization. Having some background in open educational resources and open innovation, I first reflected upon, what open management is and how competency development has to react to it and what technological implications are. Here are my thoughts.

What is open management and what are its consequences?

In a traditional, hierarchical organisation, communication follows the hierarchy in terms of delegation and report. While this form of organization is well suited for a divide and conquer approach of industrialized organizations, it falls short of fostering collaboration among members outside the hierarchical paths. Consequently, careers in such organizations follow the hierarchy.

This is in contrast to how social networks work: people are connected to various other people by various links (family, friendship, shared interest, membership of the same club, etc.). Why are organizations often so strict in disregarding these aspects of relationships among their members?

In recent times, organizations recognized that the traditional way of managing an organization no longer suits the requirements of the knowledge age. As Eric Smith, CEO of Google, once put it: "Smart people want to work with smart people". Especially creative and innovative people expect to behave in their organization as they do in their social network: connect to people by interest and task rather than by hierarchy.

What are the consequences for education and competency management?

Education is affected by this as well: while the traditional career follows the hierarchy, a networked knowledge worker finds many more possible paths to follow.

To manage such an organization requires a whole new set of management competencies: the manager has to become a leader and enabler rather than a delegator and controller. She needs to know how to foster creativity, knowledge exchange, and entrepreneurial thinking among the team members. Of course, existing management competencies are not obsolete and not all hierarchies will be removed - the networked layer is an additional, complementary way of exploiting an organization's resources.

Career development for all members of the organization follows different paths in an open management organization: the career may follow additional network paths rather than only the hierarchy. These paths may also lead outside the organization. But isn't this a threat? No, if the organization recognizes the value of an additional network hub - the former employee working now at a different organization might still be connected to the old colleagues.

By opening up, the organization benefits from higher motivated employees, better exploitation of individual development perspectives and higher innovation cycles. While an open network is the key to connections, communication, opportunities, and awareness, it does in itself not offer education. But, it offers a set of requirements organizations will have to face, when opening up.

A traditional HR department or a corporate academy offers trainings, which support an employee to either perform better in her current job or to prepare for the subsequent career step. But how do we prepare, if the subsequent step is less clear?

The key might be meta-education: learn how to learn, learn how to prepare yourself, learn how to take a risk, learn how to be responsible. And open educational resources offer a way to accomplish educational challenges here: accessible by anyone, they pave the way to more personalised education driven by interest and need.

How is technology involved to address these challenges?

Technology might play the role of an enabler. Open management is partly a reaction to a technology driven change in social network behavior: with an increasing amount of manageable network connections people are just more aware of what's happening around them.

Offering organizational social network solutions seem to be a way to address this issue from within an organization. However, lots of challenges need to be addressed: if the organization is really serious about opening up, it needs to provide solutions for people entering and leaving the organization: what happens to my personal network? Who owns it? What happens to my competency profile? Can I take it with me? How can partners outside my organization connect to my network?

While public networking platforms like linkedin provide a practical alternative, many organizations hesitate to give the control of their network outside. Standardised profiles provide another alternative, allowing to export profiles from one network system and import it into another. Interoperability is a third alternative, allowing network systems to exchange information and to reduce the hassle of being registered in too many network systems.

The way is still long, first steps have already been taken. Time to carry the ideas into the organizations!

Note: the slides of my talk are available (in German) from here: http://dspace.ou.nl/handle/1820/4794

StreetLearn beyond the street?

2012-06-11T12:38:51Z

Quite soon after Google's announcement to start Off-Road StreetView with Trecker Backpacks, the German company Streetview Technology offers a DIY-Kit to film and create StreetView models on your own.

Trecker Backpacks in Action

DIY-StreetView-Kit

This way, educational scenarios based on the StreetLearn serious gaming toolkit will be possible in areas not covered by StreetView originally. Downside: the DIY-Kits are not cheap and will probably not be available to private persons.

The virtual sandbox

2012-05-07T14:42:27Z

Immersive learning scenarios aim to involve the user in activities. 3D environments and tangible user interfaces enable immersive learning scenarios. The next step is combining real time 3D model generation, gesture control, and simulation engines into complex scenarios such as the following movie exemplifies with a sandbox and a kinnect based 3D modelling approach.

This combination of approaches (done by the UC Davis W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences, http://www.keckcaves.org) paves the way for learning scenarios, which combine the physical environment (here: the sandbox) with simulated augmentations (here: the water). Combined with the gesture control and the realtime model updates, this allows for very complex scenarios to be experienced in a simple trial and error manner.

Shaping mixed reality games - the StreetLearn experience

2012-01-24T15:59:46Z

Google StreetView offers you the chance to travel without moving. Unlike Google Earth's bird eye view on the scenery, StreetView lets you experience the pedestrian perspective, which gives you more of the "being there" feeling.

From an educational perspective this may be interesting, especially for domains with a highly local geographic focus (e.g. architecture, cultural science): saving travel cost and time plus the possibility to explore many sites in a short period are among the core arguments for using such technologies for educational purposes. But can we go beyond just using these tools instead of maps and pictures? Can we explore their interactiveness to provide a richer experience? Can we use their open interfaces to enhance their functionality for our specific educational needs?

In this post, we aim to address this from a technical perspective: as the development of interactive educational material is costly and laborious, we explore Google's stack of openly available technologies for the development of enhanced and immersive learning services. Additionally we aim to tackle another goal: we want to use the same architecture for augmented reality mobile games and augmented virtuality games for stationary devices. In a sister project (ARLearn), we explored the mobile variant of this architecutre. See here for a description of a previous ARLearn prototype.

Within the StreetLearn project, we realized a prototype for an augmented virtuality game environment solely based on openly available tools. We created an environment, in which we can place game plays onto real world maps, enhanced with information and interaction items. A user can navigate through accessible locations, get information, solve tasks/quests, find objects, take decisions, be confronted with events and messages. Teams can be created to work cooperatively (competing with other teams).

The scenario described here involves authors, teachers, and students. Authors can prepare and publish educational scenarios as maps. Students can select and play these maps. Teachers can include selected maps into their teaching. StreetLearn can be used to support a range of different didactical scenarios: It can be used as a replacement for an excursion, to prepare an excursion, to evaluate an excursion, or to prepare student exchange programs.

To support the development of serious games for these different educational scenarios, we developed an object model as depicted in a simplified form in the following figure:

Fig. 1: StreetLearn object model

This object model is complemented by an architecture, which is solely based on openly accessible tools, mainly from Google:

Fig. 2: StreetLEarn component architecture

Results

The prototype of StreetLearn is in place. After an internal review of the first implementation at CELSTEC, the prototype is ready to be evaluated with a real game case scenario.

Technically, the prototype is build on google’s appengine technology as application server environemnt and as backend storage technology. This freely available technology offers high scalability at low setup cost. The user interface of StreetLearn is realised with Google’s StreetView technology, that offers intuitive navigation and visualisation facilities and an open API for technical enhancements. The StreetView user interface is extended in StreetLearn with additional control & status elements (game controls) and visualisations of interactive game elements embedded in the 3D environment.

StreetLearn user interface based on StreetView

StreetLearn: interactive tests embedded in the game play