The concept of Work-integrated learning (WIL) is very closely connected to the concept of purposefully designed curriculum. The main focus is on conducting a range of rigorous approaches to integrate theory with the practice. The existing view of the WIL emerged out of the theory of employability. WIL has been traditionally viewed as a strategic merely curriculum design rather than adopting a Whole-organization approach to effective leadership theory–practice symbiosis (LTPS), which we advocate. Such an approach is useful in enhancing an awareness to consider concerns and interests of all stakeholders that are involved in the multiple initiatives pursued in higher education institutions. But it requires fundamental rethinking and radical design of WIL-inspired educational processes such as course design. Rethinking implies approaching WIL ontologically. Depending on which extent the concept of WIL has been perceived by universities worldwide, it has been thus viewed and implemented from a diverse spectrum of perspectives. First, we discuss the implications for the existed conceptual differences. Thereafter, and inspired by the main philosophical assumptions underpinning a Whole-organization approach to WIL, we propose and thus thoroughly concretize a framework which we call Work-related Educational Activities (WREA). The model which is the theoretical foundation of WREA consists of a category of several components. After identification of the main components of the model, we adopt an ontological approach to the reconceptualization of WIL. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to demonstrate how University West in Sweden views WIL, which is its newly announced research profile. Secondly, an attempt to re-conceptualize WIL by conducting an ontological approach to WREA.

Ever since the 50’s users has played a great role in the research aboutinformation systems. However, users have mainly been considered as operators of the information system or as managers receiving the output. In this article I argue that users are not operators but clerks performing their job. In the same way as I’m a driver and not a car user when I drive my car, the clerk is performing the work, not using an information system. Knowing how to use the information system the clerk produces useful inform ation without paying any specific attention to the artifact. This perspective put certain demands on the designer of the artifacts, in fact (s)he should be a meta-designer, providing the clerks with useful tools for designing their own workflows

The concept of information is often taken for more or less granted in research about information systems. This paper introduce a model starting with Shannon and Weaver’s data transmission model and ends with knowledge transfer between individual persons. The model is in fact an enhanced communication model giving a framework for discussing problems in the communication process. A specific feature of the model is the aim for providing design guidelines in designing the communication process. The article ends with identifying a need for develop the model further to incorporate also communication within and between organisations of different kinds.

The concept of information is often taken for more or less granted in research about information systems. This paper introduces a model starting with Shannon and Weaver data transmission model and ends with knowledge transfer between individual persons. The model is in fact an enhanced communication model giving a framework for discussing problems in the communication process. A specific feature of the model is the aim for providing design guidelines in designing the communication process. The article ends with identifying a need for develop the model further to incorporate also communication within and between organisations of different kinds.

Abstract. I consider my career as rather exceptional. I think I am the only living person in Sweden who achieved a professor chair with only one international journal publication; a publication I use as an example of a totally incomprehensible text! The following is the storyof how I achieved this. I first describe two important issues that have governed my decisionsin the career: Being interpretivist in a dominating positivist research paradigm and my decision not to publish. This is important for understanding my interpretation of what was happening. Then I describe the four universities where I have worked, first by providing the story, then describing how the discipline developed at that place and finally some reflections on the research we conducted. I summarize by giving an historic overview of informatics as Iperceive it after 44 years of teaching and finally I reflect upon my career according to my goals.

The domain of informatics, was initially development of computer-based information systems based on mathematical/logical perspective. In mid-1970s, some doctoral students stated that use of these systems should also be studied. Hence work content, work environment and power relations at the workplace should be studied. This cannot be done solely with mathematical/logical methods. Based on Ludwik Fleck's concepts of thought style and thought-collective, Kuhn's paradigm theory and Berger & Luckmann's knowledge sociology, some events taking place during the decade 1975-85 are analyzed and the concept of though tstruggle is introduced. My problem statement is:

1. How can the conceptual idea within the informatics in Sweden during the period 1970-1985 be understood?

2. Why did this happen just then?

3. How does it fit into the other changes in society?

The result is a description of the thought struggle, what triggered it and what it led to, and where the events have been placed within dimensions of time, positivism and philosophy.

The concept of information is often taken for more or less granted in research about information systems. This paper introduce a model starting with Shannon and Weaver´s data transmission model and ends with knowledge transfer between individual persons. The model is in fact an enhanced communication model giving a framework for discussing problems in the communication process. A specific feature of the model is the aim for providing design guidelines i designing the communication process. The article ends with identifying a need for develop the model further to incorporate also communication within and between organisations of different kinds.

In IRIS business meeting 2015 it was decided that we should undertake a description of 40 years of trends, topics, theories and methods used by the IRIS community. In this paper a method for doing such an investigation is described and the problem of the paper is to find ways of improving it. This is done in a pilot investigation, which is evaluated. The conclusion is that at least one more test need to be done. 

Systems development seems to be taught in a very traditional way in the Swedish unversities. It is supposed that an inhouse development starting from scratch will be at hand. This is shown using an investigation of current books in the area, of contemporary educations in systems deveopment. But the needs from the business word are different and this is shown in an investigation of job advertisments in Sweden. The conclusion is that informatics as subject is at a deep crise: We educate students for a work that was at hand in the 80´s and not for the 21st century!

A contact service in a municipality is a place where the citizens can apply for processing of their claims concerning municipal jurisdiction. Examples could be application for a place at pre-school, planning permission or change of dustbin etc. The clerks at the contact centre should be able to provide immediate service in most of the matters. This requires the work-process for each matter to be known. Before starting of a contact service this knowledge existed in the administration for the actual claim. In many cases it was tacit and not described. This paper discusses the problem of making this knowledge explicit and described in order to be used at the contact service. Issues concerning work organisation, personnel and job satisfaction are recognised, but not in focus. Instead our focus lies on the work content, processing of the claims, which the clerks are dealing with. It is a qualitative study, based upon three existing contact services and one, which is in the design phase. We start with a brief discussion of different types of knowledge, related to classical epistemologies within the organisation area (Nonaka & Takeuchi, Brown & Duguid, Cook & Brown, Polyani, etc). Based upon empirical material from the cases we identify some typical knowledge categories. It might be general knowledge about rules, procedures and such things; it might be experience-based knowledge from previous claims, typical claims and work praxis developed over time. It might also be knowledge about the specific citizen and about the specific application. But it can also be totally new categories. Two categories we are pretty sure to identify are matter-oriented knowledge, concerning the actual matter and procedural knowledge, concerning the processing of the matter-oriented knowledge. In our previous research about work-flow four levels have been identified and we suspect the same basic reasoning might apply here.

When Internet in the middle of the 1990s made its breakthrough a revolution occurred compared to the industrial revolution. Suddenly the cost for information transport was reduced to almost zero and genuinely new opportunities arose. Work, that can be performed by unskilled workers, are outsourced and the focus is on the business process. This requires a genuine new way of doing business; we see a need for trust, loyalty, and sharing of values. Education of users at the workplace will be a major concern and a common language and a mutual and deep understanding of the concepts and social contexts used is a prerequisite. A 3D apple model for context is described. For defining the social context, a user centred approach must be used. We need genuinely new informatics paradigms adapted to the network economy. This requires a massive re-education of all workers, both white and blue collar. To sum it all up: Reliable and sustainable production, availability of reliable information, trust, and flexibility are the means for us to survive in this new economy.

Establishing contact centres in municipalities is a contemporary issue. Many municipalities started establishing contact centres as the municipalities face towards the environment. A problem often neglected is the integration of the contact centre with the other administrations of the municipality. Our focus lies on designing common processes in the municipality for ensuring an information flow between the contact centre and the administrations. Derived from the empirical data, the authors present a model with the purpose to establish processes, which might reduce conflicts between the contact centre and the administrations. A focus is on the use of naming and tagging matters. The model is based upon the use of ontologies of the clerks working with a matter in a workflow. One characteristic of this model is that the ontologies are developed in close cooperation with the clerks. 

A case study is analyzed and lessons learned from the emergence of the Sambruk Academia for Swedish municipalities are discussed. The case study of an e-learning project was part of the Innoveta project, supporting and evaluating the establishment of contact centers in Swedish municipalities. An e-circle and video films were developed using Moodle as a Learning Management Systems. The main results were that it is important not to imitate successful solutions from other organizations, because of the different contexts and cultures. Instead good examples could be used in order to inspire, but there is a strong need of initial investigation and understanding of the learning cultures in the organizations, in order to develop e-learning courses that are relevant and used. It is also important to create a project group with members both from the organization and researchers, in order to have a mutual responsibility and understanding of the work.

The notions of immigration and social integration have increasingly become central themes in public discourse,particularly in the European Union. Besides opportunities, this phenomenon also poses challenges to the host nations of promoting social integration of immigrants. Continuing an earlier Design Science Research project that developed an open learning platform for Civic Orientation in Sweden, this paper attempts to extend this platform using Jürgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action as an inspiration. We aim at designing a more inclusive open learning platform for social integration that supports instrumental, strategic, normatively-regulated, dramaturgical, and communicative action. We expect to further the relevance of philosophy in IS research by not only making sense of phenomena through philosophical lens, butalso attaining inspirations from philosophy in designing sociotechnical information systems.

Abstract: In order to learn, presence is necessary. If we experience a genuinely rich presence, exams, tests and other forms of evaluating knowledge are not crucial for learning. In distance learning, the concept of presence is not obvious. Presence in distance and network contexts usually means being active on social media. However, in distance and network learning, something more is needed. It is the face-to-face interaction that needs to be "digitalized". In order to investigate this, we have turned to Heidegger (1927) and the concept of Dasein. The concept of Dasein means to apprehend the existence of the world and not only the world itself. Digital Dasein means to transcend the digital medium and reveal the essence of presence for a more translucent form of e-learning. The need for an artefact mediating Digital Dasein has been identified.

In order to learn, presence is necessary. If we experience a genuinely rich presence, exams, tests and other forms of evaluating knowledge are not crucial for learning. In distance learning, the concept of presence is not obvious. Presence in distance and network contexts usually means being active on social media. However, in distance and network learning, something more is needed. It is the face-to-face interaction that needs to be “digitalized”. In order to investigate this, we have turned to Heidegger (1927) and the concept of Dasein. The concept of Dasein means to apprehend the existence of the world and not only the world itself. Digital Dasein means to transcend the digital medium and reveal the essence of presence for a more translucent form of e-learning. The need for an artefact mediating Digital Dasein has been identified. © 2017, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. All rights reserved.

Newcomers in Sweden face a problem of learning the Swedish society with respect to laws, culture, democratic values, education system, labor market and aspects of taking the role as a parent. The municipality of Gothenburg and the county administrative board in Västra Götaland are appointed by the Swedish government to educate newcomers in civic orientation. This paper describes some problems in providing distance education for Swedish civic orientation in forms of advanced learning modules (ALM). Requirements for implications for design were gathered through several conducted workshops together with relevant stakeholders through a participatory design approach. We concluded that our design for implications can be processed for future research and used together with a system solution.

In order to achieve learning, presence is necessary. If we have good presence, no tests are necessary. In distance learning, the concept of presence is not obvious. Presence in distance and network contexts usually means being active on social media. However, in distance and network learning, something more is needed. It is the face-to-face interaction that needs to be “digitalized”. In order to investigate this, we have turned to Heidegger (1927) and the concept of Dasein. The need for an artifact mediating Dasein has been identified. The concept of Dasein is not easy, not even in philosophical terms. It means being somewhere else, and not on the place you are present. We have extended the The Community of Inquiry Model originating from Garrisson & Andersson (2003) by introducing the concept of digital Dasein.

In this paper, we have identified a gap with regard to imparting social values in an eLearning platform that was designed for orienting immigrants entering Sweden (newcomers). We identified that an existing eLearning platform is more oriented towards creating awareness rather than imparting transformative learning. Therefore, we propose a conceptual framework suggesting how to bring in the social values in eLearning platform,by subsequently applying social learning approach to promulgate transformative learning in which the learner also internalize the values in their attitude and behavior. The proposed framework makes a theoretical contribution by combining the notion of value, value content, value systems and social learning approach in the eLearning platform. The contribution also has practical implications in terms of providing transformative learning to newcomers. We argue that the contents on social values through the eLearning platform should be transformative, and not only informative. We suggest to integrate social values in the eLearning platform; make the learning transformative, and impart those values through social learning approaches such as triple-loop learning, connecting various communities of practices and to make the platform more interactive and engaging

Even though the practice of integrating evaluative features into software has long been applied in commercially available software, it is still underrepresented in the Information Systems (IS) community. This paper presents a framework for embedded evaluation support. We are aware of the challenges of evaluation of socio-technical systems and take this issue into consideration in our framework. Our framework is the result of conceptualizations drawing from the evaluation discourse discussion on the topics of artifact evaluation in DSR. We also demonstrate our ideas through two examples of embedded evaluation support mechanisms designed and used in a DSR project in the Swedish healthcare sector. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.