Being well aware of the fact that the world wide production model set up by western multinationals to take advantage of the demographic drift, will be the first to suffer from economic slowdowns, emerging economies want to rapidly upscale their value chain turning their work forces into high level knowledge workers before the conditions change.

(…) Europe needs to focus on ensuring the leading role as the cutting edge producer of qualitative knowledge workers in this evolving scenario.

This paper introduces new technologies and devices for "Instant Training" and "Personal Learning" solutions to boost personal development plans in Knowledge Economies, to help individuals needing to accelerate their Time to Competency and Time to Knowledge in this fast forwarding World.

Towards learning media based content personalization

The development of learning technologies over the last 30 years has been impressive, but only some technologies have better helped to achieve quantum leaps in the possible implementation of new educational strategies and models. (…)

Newly emerging Mobile & Broadband Internet technologies are about to boost higher levels of user interactivity and cross community collaboration, favoring a heavy migration from cognitive to constructive models for online learning & knowledge generation.

Blogs, Virtual Communities and Mobile devices are starting to demonstrate their effectiveness for online education, giving evidence that where workers and students interact amongst themselves, they construct cumulative knowledge far beyond self learning alone.
Interaction amongst students and employees adds a multiplication factor to the cognitive model each one develops when interacting with learning information and contents alone.

The learning implication of grouping would therefore alone be enough to justify the expected tenfold increase of mobile access to learning contents and experiences in the educational scenarios to come. FIGURA.

Figure 2. Towards Narrowcasting (Delivering contents
to Ubiquitous, Nomadic and Mobile Personal Learning Communities).
Clique na imagem para a visualizar em tamanho maior.

On such evidence many organizations wanting to gain a leading position in the emerging competition towards Global Knowledge Society, are riding the tiger of mobile and ubiquitous access to personalized learning contents based on new innovative media and digital content distribution networks. As a result, today, the economic forces represented by telecom and media industry, are starting again to rally the holy land of digital content for education.

Location based, context aware and "always on" access is becoming a must for workers on the move on a continuously evolving labor and professional market; and the nomadic learner is no exception.

Narrowcasting, i.e. delivering filtered information to profiled and clustered communities of interests is emerging as a new marketplace as opposed to the unfiltered and uncontrolled (by users) content delivery paradigm at the basis of the mass media market which has ruled communication over the last 50 and more years.

As the Tomita study performed in late 80s before the advent of Internet well depicts (figure 2), the evolution of media was missing a solution for effective and sustainable content personalization.

On the top of the chart we have asynch communication media (letter, book, film.), which enable to reach a variety of users but with no synch capability. Then, on the bottom of the chart, we have the flourishing of synchronous technologies (radio, television and telecom) where "time to inform" is the main value… The right side of the chart represents mass communication as a conglomerate of all media to reach mass, the main market which has established over he last 50 years as the main sustainable business models.

These three areas are the ones where most of the cash of the Industry flows today, but this happens because until now it was not feasible to do content personalization since "Self Sustainability" was reached only through larger target audience.

Now with the advent of Broadband and Mobile Internet access, Narrowcasting, a new way of communication, enabling us to reach very focused communities, is addressing the communication gap left by "traditional" media and more than 50 years of Broadcasting, where content quality was only sustainable by addressing Mass Markets audiences leaving personal communication and development out. (…)

Within Blogs, Podcasts and Mobile networks the Socratic way to teaching to communities re-emerges after years of mass media communication.

Towards skills based content personalization

Given the scenario depicted in the previous paragraph it is not difficult to forecast that in the next years, users, including workers and employees, will want to get increasing nomadic and ubiquitous access to their online contents and communities of interest making Media Content Personalization, or Narrowcasting, one of the main teaching paradigms the future Digital Economy, with Mobile & Location Based Knowledge access becoming a converging interest of Publishing, Learning, Media and Telecom players in the very next future.

Delivering new Personalized Content Formats to workers on field scenarios, taking into account their devices, position and context of use will anyhow just be one part of the personalization equation.

The other big challenge will be to continuously match content delivery to workers pre-existing skills and competences well recorded and interchanged in standard Portfolios and Learner Information Profiles (LIPs). (…)

Ambient Content, i.e. Content designed to favor seamless access to users whilst adapting to their skills and competencies, in the location they are, the digital device they have and the context they are in, will become the main format for content owners willing to position their services in the Knowledge Society.

Conceiving new Ambient Content formats able to adapt to the user background and skills, location and context of use, making this media revolution meaningful and satisfactory for the Knowledge Worker of Tomorrow's Learner centric Organizations is the other big challenge in Content Personalization. (…)

In addition, Skills based Personalization will require an important alignment exercise between different vocational systems at both international and inter-sector level to make acquired skills rapidly recognized and transferable at a pan European level.

Mobile and skills based education... is europe ready?

Although Europe has always been at the very front of new learning and media technologies Research and Development programs, in general the European Industry has never been rapid to uptake innovation at start.
(…) Today Europe's RD is again at the front row of the Mobile and Personal Learning Revolution.

Projects such as Mobilearn, WearitAtWork, Prolix and TenCompetence (Figure 5 and 6) have managed to set up interdisciplinary consortia bringing together telecom operators, broadcasters, content owners, Academia and Multinationals from leading European sectors (e.g. Avionics, Automotive, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Telecom & Services) starting to demonstrate power and effectiveness of Personal Learning via context aware & location based information delivery to home, work, classroom and outdoor workers, keeping track of their needs, habits, skills and "digital story" whilst in their nomadic routing across organizations and labor markets. (…)

But is the European Industry ready to uptake such achievements or does the rapid pace at which this Mobile & Personal Learning Revolution is likely to take place, risk, once again, to meet the European industry unprepared and unfocused?

To avoid a skilling outrun, Europe has to rapidly conceive new learning content production and distribution models for its learning contents being economically viable, technologically advanced and pedagogically sounded.

To compete in the emerging international markets, higher degrees of content interoperability, localization and personalization must be achieved in Europe, preserving cultural differences yet underpinning alignment of diverse educational systems by means of technology and credits interoperability standards.

Learning Resources must be designed for future proof reusability and internetworking based upon new generation technologies such as XML and Web Services, adopting application profiles and fostering design by Content Objects to support flexible repackaging and re-versioning for different learning paths, contexts, profiles and devices.

Good practices in eLearning infrastructures and technologies together with needed pedagogic models, content formats and human resources skills and competencies must be rapidly promoted.

Publishing and educational innovation must be combined with new content management technologies, dedicated to learning and mobile deployments; better interchange and interoperability of learning contents across national borders and different vocational systems in Europe must be achieved. Alignment of educational systems and contents become mandatory.

Conclusions

Today the demographic drift in World Population brings new challenges to the Labor Market. Together with upskilling strategies starting to emerge from new World economies, this drift can radically change the topology of labor in the next future.

Higher degrees of Knowledge personalization become the main challenge for leading Economies to keep their high stake positioning in such evolving scenario. Personalization that may be achieved by wider uptake of new mobile solutions offering location based and context aware access to Knowledge together with higher adaptiveness to learner's skills, capabilities and backgrounds.

Underestimating the needed urgency for promoting such personalization methodologies and technologies is a great risk to currently leading Economies in the evolving World. A risk no Economy can afford to take in today's high paced trend towards the Knowledge Society.