Investigating the Suitability of Mashups for Informal Learning and Personal Knowledge Management

It has been shown that most of our daily learning takes place outside formal settings (e.g., seminars or trainings) where knowledge is transferred from a teacher to a learner and a certificate is often the result. This so-called informal learning is a life-long process where individuals continuously acquire knowledge. It constitutes an important element of every individual’s personal knowledge management (PKM) process. Web 2.0 concepts and techniques facilitate communication with distributed individuals and help knowledge workers to cope with the immense information overload by simplifying the organization, integration, and reuse of information scattered across diverse content sources. In this paper, we investigate mashups in terms of their suitability for supporting and improving the quality of PKM and hence informal learning. This is done by analyzing which mashup features contribute to a set of information skills and learning objectives. Our analysis shows that common mashup features have the potential to broadly support designated information skills of knowledge workers.