EC DGXIII Project: Just In Time Open Learning - JITOL (1992-95)

The JITOL project, from which the Jitol concept developed, originated as a result of the synergy which arose from two quite distinct sources:

· Neurope Lab had been established on an advanced technology international business park to examine industrial needs for knowledge management and access with a view to establishing an operational framework for learning organisations;

· at Lancaster University, a model to capitalise on information and communications technologies [ICT] had been defined to meet a perceived governmental need to increase knowledge transfer between universities and industry.

At the same time, there was also a dissatisfaction with approaches to training which used ICT purely as a delivery mechanism, and the implicit assumption that the pan-European scale would make such approaches a cost-effective means to meet widely accepted training and development needs.

From this background, the purpose of the JITOL project was to experiment with variants of a model to support the professional development of those working in enterprises in various parts of Europe with varying cultural and socio-economic origins.

The project focused on the development and evaluation of IT-based learning environments to support the professional development of individuals. There was commitment to, and strength drawn from, capitalising on the contextual expertise and skill of these professionals. The term 'communities of practice' has been adopted as appropriate to describe groups of people such as those who work in similar jobs and have common job-related interests. A central goal, therefore, was to explore ways in which ICT could stimulate and support the exchange and collaborative sharing of expertise between professionals who were in different organisations and between professionals within the same organisation, the latter leading towards the building of a learning organisation.

A major innovative element in the project related to the rapidly changing and informal nature of professional knowledge. Whilst formalised knowledge has always been shared, the JITOL emphasis has been on the contextual knowledge which evolved during peer interactions. Hence, although the initial interaction between peers may be stimulated by a formal knowledge base, the experiments examined ways in which the expertise made explicit during 'situated' interactions could be captured and transformed into knowledge which was progressively incorporated into an evolving knowledge resource base. This process is referred to as 'reification'.

The major outcomes of the project have been of two kinds:

· methodologies

· tools

The production of both of these have contributed to basic theories related to human development and knowledge engineering.

A major contribution has been a better understanding of the process of knowledge reification. The experience of context-based efforts to synthesise the traces of human-human interaction arising in computer conferences, followed by the validation of the resulting knowledge objects, has demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach.

A second methodological contribution has been that concerned with the evaluation of methods of using ICT to support human development (including what is traditionally termed 'education and training').

Two Special Issues of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning provide a variety of papers (and references) to the project and to the field more generally:

JCAL, Vol. 8, No. 3 September 1992 JCAL, Vol. 11, No. 4 December 1995