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Professionals in social work practice depend on a high level of skills, intellectual ability and a wide knowledge base to find innovative solutions for the complex problems they encounter. They learn by experience and through social interaction using dialogue and discussion with relevant others to create new knowledge. To support their learning, they search for the most suitable and most relevant dialogue partner available in their extensive personal professional network. This is a difficult, high-skilled task, for which little technological support is available. This paper presents a literature review on the learning needs of these professionals and considers the use of technology as a means of supporting this type of learning. It argues for the need for more insight into the strategies used by professionals in building, maintaining and activating connections in their personal professional network for learning purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lifelong learners somehow need to fulfil their competence development needs. Traditionally, this has been done mainly in formal settings. However, this paper argues from the assumption that non-formal educational settings are much better suited; particularly so if a Learning Network is used to provide a social environment in which to embed learning opportunities. A Learning Network is not nor consists of communities from the outset; its community-like nature should emerge from the interactions of its inhabitants and evolve over time. How can this be done? Although learners might have several long-term motives to engage socially, the paper notes that little is known about their short-term motives. The notion of ad-hoc transient communities is then introduced as a promising mechanism to drive the emergence and evolution of social behaviour in Learning Networks. Subsequently, various theoretical notions for why such communities can provide the short-term motives sought are discussed. A short discussion of future areas for research closes the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an open innovation environment, organizational learning takes place by means of dispersed teams which expand their knowledge through collaborative idea generation. Research is often focused on finding ways to extend the set of ideas, while the main problem in our opinion is not the number of ideas that is generated, but a non-optimal set of ideas accepted during idea selection. When selecting ideas, coalitions form and their composition may influence the resulting set of accepted ideas. We expect that computing coalitional strength during idea selection will help in forming the right teams to have a grand coalition, or having a better allocation of accepted ideas, or neutralising factors that adversely influence the decision making process. Based on a literature survey, this paper proposes the application of the Shapley value and the nucleolus to compute coalitional strength in order to enhance the group decision making process during collaborative idea selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]