Situated learning in the work process

Situated learning in an authentic process is the most natural kind of learning. If there are no restrictions for learners like media accessibility, trainer and co-learner availability, time and location constraints every learner would learn when s/he needs the respective knowledge or skill. But actually there are restrictions. During the history of media development there were accessibility limitations like price, form factor, usability in specific environments no matter whether the media were a scribble, a book, a slide, a video or a computer screen. The same is true for teachers and trainers who are not available every time and everywhere on demand but have to be organized for specific sessions for specific learner groups. Finally restrictions also exist for the cognitive learning process. During the learning process no isolated steps of knowledge acquisition take place but interlinked knowledge construction is based on existing patterns of knowledge extending the complexity of understanding and the range of competence in a given area. Learners continuously extend their knowledge by exploration and by experience. The paper focuses on contributions to situated learning in the process of the acquisition, use and reuse of knowledge together with other partners in different roles like co-learners, instructors, preor post-processors of content. Annotation facilities for situated learning and relearning are introduced and experiences are reported. Beyond static annotations episode recordings and mobile collection facilities are presented for dynamic sequences of problems or solutions.