Contexts and Language and final count down :-)

“2017 was a great but also challenging year. Like I described in my last post I started a new job in Kassel and officially was accepted a phd-student in Marburg. Combining and structuring job and external phd is not easy it took some time to get accustomed to a new routine, but I succeeded to place 2 new articles which will become part of the cumulative phd.

In 2018 I am now about to finish an extended version of my LTEC 2018 article and hopefully to finish my phd this summer. My year will start with 2 weeks of “holiday” which I will use to finish the structure and title and to plan the last steps in structuring my timetable. I will keep you updated, as soon as I can write more about it.”

This was the content of my last post this year, and not posting did not mean I have not been busy … on the contrary! Nevertheless sorry for this unintended long lasting time without updates!

What happend since? After finishing the last two articles to be included into the thesis, I started to work on the structure and content for the framing text. I wrote the introductional and methods-part and an introductionary part for the chapter which included the published articles to show their coming into being, their common thread and the direction my questions of research were developing to. And this was what developed and changed (isn`t this the same???) heavily in 2018: Early in the year I had a job interview which offered very challenging and promising perspectives for my professional future. I decided to end my “University-Job-Life” 😉 and started to work as educational scientist at the BKK Akademie in Rotenburg, which is near my home, so I did not have to move to another place. The BKK Akademieis the corporate educational institution for  apprenticeship, and corporate vocational learning programs for the (recently roundabout 80) company-health-insurance-funds in Germany (in German BKK is BetriebsKrankenKasse). My job for at least the next 5 years will be to redesign the concept of apprenticeship, and corporate vocational learning programs,to re-think, re-develop, conduct and evaluate methods and standards for a future-oriented and sustainable learning concept seen from a perspective of lifelong learning, a raising heterogeneity and digitalization.

Luckily they also support me with finishing my dissertation project and it was just the right time, before really going into the writing process of the framework, to extend the focus from academic learning processes and universities towards the broader context of learning systems, including networks of different systems and to include and focus learning processes in organizations and vocational and apprenticeship learning.

For this weblog this also means that I will continue to include global findings and inputs not only from different systems, but also different countries, so I am happy that also in 2018 I will take part at the LTEC/KMO conference which takes part in Zilinia, Slovakia this August.

Nevertheless the relevant literature and discourse for our recent project “Apprenticeship 2021” is written and discussed in German, which is the reason why I will “awaken” the German Weblog (http://www.core2zero.net/deutsch/) again.

I can not promise yet to translate every single post, but I will definitely at least summarize the final ongoing of my thesis and the research ideas and processes which will follow!