by Fabian Meissner & Stefan Spiess

Does it matter whether you are a man or a woman when it comes to learning at your workplace? How does your popularity influence the process? And: Who really is the person in your company that passes on the important knowledge? These Questions are all asked under one basic premise: Learning is a process of social interaction, and so it is subject to multiple social factors. Workplace Learning is no exception to that, so our task was to take a closer look on how social reality is constructed at a workplace. Since we were especially interested in the questions mentioned above, we decided to focus on two main issues: gender and network structures. At first, however, we want to explain our concept of the term “socio-cultural” in order to prevent misunderstandings and shed a little light on our idea of the social construction of knowledge.

by Agathe Jasinski & Christoph Huschka

The topic of expertise is discussed more and more in our civilization. It isn’t easy to define the area of an expert. A simple way of the development into an expert could in our opinion be explained by regarding pupils, teachers and professors. The majority of people believes that every professor is an expert. In order to become a professor you have to absolve a higher school, then you have to specialize in a specific domain. For some people the teacher’s expertise is between that of a pupil and that of a professor. But is this already expertise? We want to show up different aspects, that might help to regard this discussion from different points of view.

by Manuela Klungler & Johannes Griesinger

After giving a short overview of the topic “learning through work”, this article should inform about the origin of mistakes and their importance for learning processes.  Besides, two empirical studies analyzing the treatment of mistakes by organizations are presented.  In the end, readers can find a list of representatives and literature dealing with the approach of learning from mistakes.

by Lena Bernhardt & Esther Beltermann

The idea of  ‘Learning by doing’ – as a preferred way of workplace learning (Bove & Kroth, 2001) – bases on the constructivist approach which characterizes learning as an activity that is strongly related to the context in which it occurs and to the learner himself. The overall aim is to develop expertise.

By explaining and structuring the main ideas, this article outlines the idea of ’Learning by doing’. A review of the underlying (learning) theories builds the basis which is replenished by a brief definition of expertise. The benefits and problems of this concept are subsequently demonstrated. We close with an overview on the literature used for this article and abstracts of crucial empirical studies.

by Judith Aschenbrenner & Michael Hellwig

Imagine: Mr. W., an office worker of a big company, sits at his desktop. There’s no contact to his colleagues: Mr. W. begins his working day alone and leaves his workplace without having any social relationships during the day. The notebook in front of him is neither connected to the World Wide Web nor to the intranet of the company. There’s no telephone in the office, and no possibilities of postal contact exist. In short: he’s totally isolated, and that’s his daily routine since he has started his job at the company 20 years ago.

This case isn’t very realistic. Excepting the human needs for social participation, Mr. W. surely couldn’t do his job very well under these conditions. However, the example might hit an essential point in understanding the principles of Workplace Learning: Although a nurse and a broker behave totally different at work and the conditions of an assembly-line worker’s workplace aren’t very similar to those of a football player – all workers in any culture at any workplace participate in their social environment and are influenced by it. The socio-cultural approach of learning deals with these interconnections between the individual and the (social) environment and may help us in our concerns to understand the occurring processes at work in a science-based way.

by Katja Steinhauser & Clarissa Uihlein

This article will give you an overview about the beginning of research on workplace learning. The main focus is on the theory of situated cognition which was the basis for further research.

The article is divided in several parts: Definitions, origin, main ideas of the situated cognition movement, empirical study, our position, important researchers, studies and literature.