Competencies acquisition and advancement

Like the more traditional concept of ability, competence conceptualizations are generally referring to an individual’s potentiality for action in a range of challenging situations. It is thus a concept that foremost indicates a precondition for future problem solving and coping (including the use of adequate tools) in a particular area of action.

The more elaborated contemporary conceptualizations of competence are best understood as a programmatic attempt to expand older notions of what constitutes the necessary dispositions for successful problem solving and coping in a given area of action. In general what used to be emphasized was the role of well trained, standardized, and largely automated procedural skills and of factual knowledge for successful problem solving and coping. Now, this emphasis is increasingly coming under scrutiny, since situational challenges in many work and life contexts cannot be mastered by applying routine procedural skills and knowledge anymore. Instead, the changing conditions for life and work produce situations that can be described as dynamic, complex, open-ended, and ambiguous, and that regularly require novel, creative and sometimes surprising solutions. This is where the old notion of qualification that is based on requirements analysis oriented in the past and on the acquisition and performance of standardized procedural skills and factual knowledge clearly shows its limits.

Erpenbeck and Heyse (1999) thus emphasize, for example, the importance of internalized orientations, values and attitudes for coping with dynamic, open-ended and complex problem situations where actors cannot exclusively rely on a stock of factual knowledge and procedural skills previously acquired. They argue that factual knowledge and procedural skills can only be viewed as necessary but not as sufficient for the execution of successful (“competent”) action in many areas of human activity. They propose to conceptualize competence as a set of (interrelated) dispositions for the execution of self-organizing action in a particular area of challenge. This broad set of dispositions entails 1) factual knowledge and procedural skills previously acquired, 2) internalized orientations, values and attitudes, understood as “order parameters” (see for example Haken, 2004, on Synergetics) for self-organizing action that requires continuous decision making under (cognitive) uncertainty, and 3) volitional aspects (notions of volition, motivation, drive, etc.) that are understood as the ability to activate and realize the other personal assets.

In the specific context of formal higher-educational settings in which actors are distributed geographically, culturally (nationally), and over disciplines, and in which communication and interaction is mediated through increasingly heterogeneous landscapes of networked tools and services, iCamp focuses on the advancement of competencies in the following areas of challenge:
1. Self-directing and self-organising intentional change/learning projects
2. Collaborating
3. Social-Networking

Of course, these areas of challenge are highly interconnected. Nevertheless, it is possible to accentuate them from the point of view of educational design and intervention in a particular setting.

It is important to note that we are mainly interested in performance support for people who try to design and manage domain-specific instructional activities in a way that opportunities for competence advancement can occur in the areas of challenge that we have specified. So, we don’t attempt to construct explanatory models of why and how adults execute certain competencies under particular conditions. Instead, we want to model from an interventionist perspective. We want to offer practitioners a conceptual and technical toolbox to (re)design and (re)organise their domain-specific teaching in ways that allow for the advancement of competencies that go beyond subject matter acquisition.