In a few hours I’ll take off to Australia, thus some housekeeping is required (firewalls etc, you know). I just checked the newsreader to find some 100 news unread. What striked me most was the ongoing discussion about the German blogosphere. It seems as if there is an urgent need to talk about it in a rather eary-eyed tone.

Yesterday, short before leaving for Australia, I attended an interesting event “The Destruction of the Middle Class“, organized by the ÖGB (Austrian Trade Union), together with Jan Schmidt, check his blogpost for his leave-Vienna notice:

Flashlights: political jargon that tried to capture the change from Fordist society to a post-Fordist society.
A society where the knowledge worker is supposed to be dominant accompanied by precarious employment contexts.

E-Learning meets Wissensmanagement – Wie Qualifikations- und Kompetenzentwicklung
in Betrieben zugleich erfolgen:
“Die betriebliche Weiterbildung setzt vornehmlich
auf die Entwicklung der Qualifikation; im Wissensmanagement wird die Kompetenzentwicklung
betont.”

Kompetenzentwicklung geht daher über das klassische Verständnis von beruflicher Handlungskompetenz hinaus. Eingeschlossen wird dadurch gewissermaßen eine permanente Selbstevaluation des eigenen Handelns.

Sounds as if Social Software belongs to interaction design at least according to this rather broad definition:

Five Lenses: Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design, by Thomas Erickson: “Interaction design has to
do with the design of any artifact, be it an object, system, or environment,
whose primary aim is to support either an interaction of a person with
the artifact, or an interaction among people that is mediated
by the artifact.”

Allusions of activity theory and genre tracing are included in this appeal to establish a conceptual toolkit for the domain of interaction design (or information design or information architecture)