Why not Empower Knowledge Workers and Lifelong Learners to Develop their own Environments?

In industrial and educational practice, learning environments are designed and implemented by experts from many different fields, reaching from traditional software development and product management to pedagogy and didactics. Workplace and lifelong learning, however, implicate that learners are more self-motivated, capable, and self-confident in achieving their goals and, consequently, tempt to consider that certain development tasks can be shifted to end-users in order to facilitate a more flexible, open, and responsive learning environment. With respect to streams like end-user development and opportunistic design, this paper elaborates a methodology for user-driven environment design for action-based activities. Based on a former research approach named ‘Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments’ (MUPPLE) we demonstrate how workplace and lifelong learners can be empowered to develop their own environment for collaborating in learner networks and which prerequisites and support facilities are necessary for this methodology.