KP-LAB Knowledge Practices Laboratory -- Report on outcomes of empirical studies

deliverablesThis deliverable has been produced in the context of the Knowledge- Practice Laboratory (KP-Lab) project. KP-Lab focuses on innovative practices of working with knowledge in higher education, teacher training, and workplaces. Participants of WP10 are University of Helsinki, University of Oslo and Pöyry Forest Industry representing both researchers and practitioners. WP10 explores knowledge practices in workplaces to understand more of the ways professionals create, use, communicate, and embed knowledge in their work. Such understandings will be made available for subsequent problem-solving in individual and collaborative knowledge advancement. In a longer term perspective this allows to explore professionals’ knowledge creation and production processes during boundary crossing between workplaces, from workplaces to education, and from higher education to workplaces. In this deliverable we report empirical findings from the case studies that are currently active in the portfolio of cases. We draw attention to aspects of artefact production, knowledge creation and practice transformation. In our studies knowledge-creation and transformation of practice rests in the interplay of tools, activities and actors. In the cases reported here, the tools provide either a) arena for productive interactions and knowledge creation, b) resources for knowledge creation and practice transformation or c) means for data collection and analytic work. The activities points to many examples where new structures of participation in knowledge work are exemplified as boundary crossing or horizontal movements as professional contribute their expertise to solve open-ended problems. The findings in the cases studies reported here will also be a resource in the continuation of work as more integrated studies; leading and satellite studies with extended pilots. In addition, the outcomes of the studies can feed into refinement of process-sensitive methodologies, exploitation and refinement of the KP-Lab Reference Model and elaboration of pedagogical models for open-ended, object-oriented inquiry as explained in pedagogical R&D in the revised research plan