Editorial

Citation

Cervai, S. and Kekale, T. (2008), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 20 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2008.08620faa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 20, Issue 6

A new month means a new issue and a new editorial. Because this is also the last of our “editorial” issues this year (the next two issues will be guest-edited Special Issues from the 2007 December RWL Conference), it may be the time for us to make some New Year resolutions. The publication world is strange, isn’t it? In the coming twenty-first volume we plan to include two Special Issues, as in 2008; one guest-edited issue on informal learning and another conference-specific. We also hope to further improve the scientific content of the journal. The methods for this are quite straightforward. Firstly, we aim to increase book review coverage to keep up with what is being published, starting in this issue with a piece from our statistics expert Massimo Borelli. If you have written a good book review (in our field or one that is closely related) or have an idea for a Special Issue, please send them to us.

We will also aim to publish at least one short paper ourselves, listing the most typical “problems” that pop up in incoming papers, for learning purposes. The first one, by Sara Cervai, Tauno Kekäle, Petra DeWeerd and Massimo Borelli, scheduled to appear in Vol. 21 No. 1 (2009), will concentrate on problems of the internal logic of qualitative and quantitative research proposed for publication in JWL and other journals with which we are involved. We have also asked Massimo to delve in more detail into the problems with statistical methods in a later issue. The double blind review system helps the authors to improve their own article, but this does not help the larger audience of future authors because the communication is private. By sharing some very typical reasons for “rejection”, we hope to be able to improve research in its earlier stages. At the reporting stage it may be too late to make changes.

And that is it for the New Year resolutions – we feel it is better not to promise too much! Moving back to the present, let’s talk about issue number 6. The paper that opens this issue is about the organising of “communities-of-practice” an is by by Sanne Akkerman, Christian Petter and Maarten de Laat. They state that in the initiation of a “CoP” it is important before an outsider starts to organise and coordinate activities that questions such as “How are we relevant to each other?” and “Who are we and where are we going?” are answered first, and by the group itself.

The second paper of the issue, by Anoush Margaryan, represents another field we would like to see more of – learning technologies. The paper advances an approach to support instructors in adopting new models of teaching, particularly when new technology is involved. The two remaining papers in this issue represent more mainstream workplace learning research. The paper by Anneli Leppänen, Leila Hopsu, Soili Klemola and Eeva Kuosma describes a follow-up study on the consequences of multi-level work training intervention. The article by Annika Olsson, Urban Bjöörn and Gunilla Jönson describes “workplace reflection” – that is, that evolution toward a learning organisation is not identified until after it actually happens, i.e. in retrospect. And following we then have the piece by Richard Dealtry on strategic learning alliances and the book review by Massimo Borelli. We again hope you enjoy reading these papers and are inspired to study workplace learning.

Sara Cervai, Tauno Kekäle