Newsletter 1 

EDITION 2009(1)  JULY 31, 2009 

Meet the TARGET team 

Key Points 

 TARGET is pionee-
ring the use of personali-
sed serious games to help
users to learn about
professional skills and
insights.

 TARGET combines
fast, transformative,
adaptive, responsive and
engaging ways to master
those skills and some- TARGET (Transformative, Adaptive, Responsive and enGaging EnvironmenT) is a Large-scale
Integrating Project partly funded by the European Community under the Seventh Framework
times to improve upon Programme: ICT-2007.4.3 Digital Libraries & Technology-Enhanced Learning 2009-2011 (Grant
them. Agreement N° 231717).

 Hit Your Target by This shows the team’s inaugural meeting, at University College London in January.
joining the TARGET (Photo courtesy of Matthias ZIMMERMANN)
discussion group, now From left to right:
Mick FLANNIGAN (UCL), João PERREIRA (INESC-ID), Daniel GONÇALVES (INESC-
on LinkedIn (http://
ID), Alvaro de OLIVEIRA (Alfamicro), Paul LEFRERE (Alfamicro), Antti KORHANEN
bit.ly/reachyourtarget) (Nokia), Tuija HEIKURA (HSE), Veli-Pekka NIITAMO (Nokia), Leif M. HOKSTAD
(NTNU), Walter WÖLFEL (Siemens), Matthias ZIMMERMANN (Siemens), Ekaterina
PRASOLOVA-FØRLAND (NTNU), Niklas RAVAJA (HSE), Asbjørn ROLSTADÅS (Sintef),
Key Contents  Lars ONSØYEN (Sintef), Ioana HULPUŞ (Cyntelix), Rui PRADA (INESC-ID), Ana PAIVA
(INESC-ID), Bjørn ANDERSEN (Sintef), Dietrich ALBERT (TUG-KMI), Ingrid
SPJELKAVIK (Sintef), Georg ÖTTL (TUG-KMI), Christian WILK (Project Officer, EU),
Fast ways to beco- 2
Marco RAPINO (HSE), Stephanie LINEK (TUG-KMI), Fabrizio GIORGINI (Giunti), William
me competent SEAGER (UCL), Manuel FRADINHO (Cyntelix), Christian RENAUD (Advisory Board,
Papers on TAR- 3 Cisco), Poul HANSEN (Advisory Board, Aalborg University). Inset: Angela SASSE (UCL)
GET
Anywhere, any time 4
learning
The FP7 logo and the European emblem are owned by the European Community. Their use in
Psychological bases 5 this newsletter reflects the fact that the TARGET consortium receives funding from the
for serious games European Community. The consortium is solely responsible for the content of this newsletter,
Integration with 5
which does not represent the opinion of the European Community. The European Community
HRM systems is not responsible for any use that might be made of information contained therein.
PAGE 2  NEWSLETTER 1
Fast ways to acquire valuable skills and insights
London, March:
Uniquely, TARGET offers users fast,
transformative, adaptive, responsive
and engaging ways to learn about, to
master and sometimes improve upon,
professional skills and insights in
areas that are important to them,
their peers, employers and society.
Initial applications: project management;
associated cross-cultural issues; and
processes and skills associated with
innovation (including skills for listen-
ing, noticing, influencing).
Here are examples of further higher-
level skills that TARGET could help
with: sense-making (spotting patterns
and key factors); bricolage (building on
what is to hand, including others’
skills, insights and experiences); con-
tributing helpfully (sharing knowledge
constructively); reflection (learning how
to get faster and better at acquiring
skills); and rehearsing (polishing skills
in advance of demonstrating them).
The Technical Details 
At the heart of TARGET is a way of
delivering personalised “serious
games” that present the user with
complex situations that result in ex-
periences that are gradually honed
into knowledge, as with Chesley
“Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot of the
plane that made a splash landing in
New York’s Hudson River in 2009.
What amazing expertise, coolness,
quick thinking, modesty: “We did
what we were trained to do in an
emergency”. Pilots practice how they
will handle potential disasters such as
a crash landing. They use realistic
computer simulations - serious
games - gaining the wide range of
experiences they need to handle un-
expected events well, even under
stress. Sully and his co-pilot were
back on the simulators before they
returned to flying.
Launched in the European Year of
Creativity and Innovation, TARGET
provides a possible way to reduce the
shortage of managers with high-level
skills in areas important for Europe’s
competitiveness, including skills rele-
vant to creativity and innovation.
The TARGET consortium is devel-
oping links with some of the most
admired professional groupings in
those areas.
An example is the APM, Association
for Project Management. TARGET
is led by Norway’s SINTEF organi-
zation, a centre of excellence in pro-
ject management.
Through such links, TARGET will
reach out to growing numbers of
professional users, conceivably in the
millions at European level, helping
them to widen their experience of
tackling challenges; to deal with chal-
lenges in ever-improving ways; to
broaden their repertoire of skills and
Flight simulators are for the few who
really need them. TARGET will let
vastly larger numbers of people learn
fast, polish their skills and extend
their repertoires.
Interacting with the software, each
user will be presented with complex
situations in the form of scenarios.
The user can try out different strate-
gies and solutions, completely risk-
free compared with real life, and see
how these work.
Over time this will result in deep and
lasting learning. TARGET is a break-
through in other ways too: uniquely,
it brings together five things that
help people to build high-level skills.
1. Examples and insights that trans-
form our understanding of a knowl-
edge domain and help us to see pat-
hence the range of challenges they
feel comfortable with; and to per-
form excellently even under stress.
This will help them to prepare for
the challenges they expect to face,
and also unexpected challenges.
The approach taken in TARGET is a
general one, applicable to low-level
skills as found in many vocational
courses, as well as to the higher-level
and more challenging skills that are
the main focus of its trials. Hence
TARGET will share its methods with
all interested European projects and
training organizations. This should
help to extend Europe’s body of
knowledge in key areas, needed to
make jobs more secure.
Funding is from the European Com-
mission (5.8 million euro) and from
industry. Project partners include
companies that are in a position to
deliver the benefits quickly to a wide
range of citizens, such as NOKIA
and SIEMENS.
terns that are important; we call these
“Threshold Concepts”.
2. Ways to handle and accommodate
new knowledge; we base our ap-
proach on biological principles, a
“Knowledge Ecology”.
3. Ways to avoid or minimize over-
load and other sources of stress, so
that people can internalize new
knowledge efficiently and can per-
form at their peak level; we call this
“Reducing Cognitive Load”.
4. Ways for all of us to develop our
competences by sharing what each of
us knows and can do; we call this
“Learning Communities”.
5. Ways to accumulate lessons
learned through real and theoretical
situations; we call this approach
“Experience Management”.
PAGE 3  NEWSLETTER 1
Spreading global awareness of TARGET  
UAE, January:
Awareness of TARGET has spread
rapidly since its start in January,
partly because of the many events
that TARGET partners have at-
tended around the world as part of
their commitment to dissemination.
The first such event, in January, saw
the participation of staff of TAR-
GET partners Alfamicro and
Cyntelix at a US-EU joint workshop
in Abu Dhabi.
TARGET papers presented at important EU workshop
Zürich, May:
TARGET presented two papers to a
focused audience of about 50 Euro-
peans highly engaged in technology-
enhanced learning research, at ETH
Zurich “Learning and Innovation in
Value Added Networks”, the annual
workshop of the IFIP Working
Group 5.7 on Experimental Interac-
tive Learning in Industrial Manage-
ment:
“Changing the Way We Learn:
Towards Agile Learning and Co-
operation”, by Hansen, Poul
Kyvsgaard, Fradinho, Manuel, An-
dersen, Bjørn, and Lefrere, Paul.
This paper addressed the need for
learning and competence develop-
TARGET paper presented at HCI 2009 conference
San Diego, July:
About 1,900 researchers attended a
co-located 9-conference event. This
paper was presented as part of a HCI
2009 special session:
“The Coming Revolution in Com-
petence Development: Using Seri-
ous Games to Improve Cross-
Cultural Skills”, by Andersen,
Other attendees included a represen-
tative from sister project ROLE; EU
SMEs, chambers of commerce; mul-
tinationals (eg, Cisco, Intel).
The workshop, part of a summit on
the needs of cities, had these aims:
- to establish a global community to
identify the competences needed for
competitiveness in priority areas (eg,
energy, waste).
- to discuss community-of-practice
ideas for competence development.
ment in industrial organizations, and
how people that enter professional
organizations today are part of a
gamer generation that have some or
much experience with on-line games.
The argument of the paper was that
games are not yet mature enough to
support the industrial training chal-
lenge as stand-alone efforts. Rather,
games can support the training and
competence development in a syn-
chronized setup with other means,
e.g., internal workshops, linking the
game to business decisions, etc.
“The Creation of a Serious Game:
Lessons Learned from the
PRIME Project”, by Andersen,
Bjørn, Cassina, Jacopo, Duin, Heiko,
and Fradinho, Manuel.
Bjørn, Fradinho, Manuel, Lefrere,
Paul, and Niitamo, Veli-Pekka.
The paper explored how the Serious
Games approach can be exploited to
aid dealing with cross-cultural issues
in project management.
Some of the skills required in project
management were reviewed, and
different models of cross-cultural
US, September:
A recent outcome of TARGET’s
participation in the Abu Dhabi work-
shop is an invitation to the Alfamicro
representative to attend a policy
workshop in the US, looking at ways
to use analytics and horizon scans to
identify competencies needed for the
future, and ways to acquire those
competencies fast. The workshop
will be attended by US government
officials, industry leaders and senior
managers in education and training.
This second paper mainly attempted
to advise efforts to design serious
games based on the experience many
TARGET partners gained through
the PRIME project. As part of the
preparations for the TARGET game
design process, a systematic
“debriefing” of the PRIME effort
was carried out, and the results are
extremely useful both to TARGET
developers and others setting out to
create serious games. The lessons
learned covered the full development
process, from analysis of interests of
end users to the evaluation of the
achievements of the project and the
possible impact of a game in the con-
tinuous learning process and consid-
ered aspects such as game design,
production process and usage issues.
analysis applied to understand how
the challenges of managing projects
are increased by cultural issues.
The TARGET approach was de-
scribed. Attendees discussed how the
TARGET serious game can be de-
signed to achieve enhanced cross-
cultural skills in users.
Link: http://www.hcii2009.org/
PAGE 4  NEWSLETTER 1
TARGET bridges more and more user needs 
Italy, July:
TARGET could be relevant to even
more user needs than first thought:
Ola Badersten, Managing Director of
Giunti Labs Scandinavia, sees the
scope as including links between
rapid competence development and
“traditional skills management, gap
and training analysis, succession
planning and performance manage-
ment”. According to Andrea Gentili
of Giunti Labs, a further area of po-
tential demand is from corporates,
“for gap analysis, training needs
analysis, assessment, peer review, job
appraisals and succession planning”,
“Anywhere, any time” competence development
Frankfurt, February:
Through projects such as TARGET,
Nokia is driving for field-leading
innovations in how and where peo-
ple can empower themselves, what-
ever their current aspirations are.
Nokia’s vision of the Knowledge
Society envisions a world where
“connecting people to what matters
empowers them to make the most of
every moment”.
If learning can be made faster, then
competence development can be-
come possible any place and any
time. TARGET offers users that
prospect. They can achieve increas-
ingly more challenging goals, that
Keynote speech on knowledge life­cycles 
London, June:
In a keynote speech to the ePortfolio
conference (www.epforum.eu),
Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of TAR-
GET partner Giunti Labs, discussed
the context of a key element of TAR-
GET: a knowledge life-cycle view of
Rapid Competence Development.
Giunti’s many customers, especially
in Europe, are highly interested in
“managing staff’s skills and compe-
tency portfolios” and “identifying,
charting and monitoring personal
skills”. Elisabetta Parodi and her
colleagues in the Giunti team work-
ing on TARGET are very excited by
the opportunities opening up for
TARGET, both in terms of potential
large-scale adoption, and in terms of
collaboration with other projects
funded, like TARGET, by the Euro-
pean Commission’s Technology En-
hanced Learning programme. An
example is the TENCompetence
project. In July, Giunti hosted a
workshop “Learning and Compe-
make them more employable : reach-
ing higher, further; performing
smarter, faster; sharing more, wider.
In future newsletters we will look at
how Nokia’s vision is supported in
depth by TARGET. Here, we report
on recent successes.
Nokia was recently voted one of the
best providers of Leadership Educa-
tion in Europe, Middle East, Africa.
TARGET’s Observatory will echo
key aspects of how Nokia looks
ahead when it plans what to include
in courses, so that users become bet-
ter informed about the current levels
of competence required in a field,
and about the competencies that are
likely to be in demand.
education and training solutions that
are not just faster and technically
superior, but that take a knowledge
life-cycle view of what is needed, as
Giunti is doing in TARGET.
Giunti is using TARGET as one of
its routes to demonstrating possible
synergies.
For example Cardinali announced a
state-of-the-art set of Portfolio and
tence Development in Europe for
tomorrow and beyond”. This work-
shop (www.tencompetence.org/
node/201). presented the rationale,
implementation and use of the TEN-
Competence infrastructure.
The workshop combined an insight
into the state of the art of compe-
tence development, stimulating dis-
cussion and accounts of pilot user
experiences with the TENCompe-
tence software and areas covered by
the new eXact Portfolio software.
TARGET was represented both by
the Giunti team and by Alfamicro
Such facilities, coupled with the abil-
ity through serious games to practise
and perfect skills, meet needs dis-
cussed in February at a conference in
Frankfurt “Strategic Learning and
Development 2009: Improving Your
Business Performance by Developing
and Optimising Your Learning &
Development Methods”. The Nokia
speaker was Petri-Jukka Salo, Direc-
tor, Human Resources Development,
Nokia Services & Software.
A perennial need at such events is for
a reliable and affordable way to
achieve rapid competence develop-
ment. Nokia’s investment in TAR-
GET brings that goal much nearer.
Skills management modules – known
as ‘eXact Portfolio’.
This is part of “Blending new genera-
tion skills, portfolio and learning
content management systems for
personalizing learning in Europe -
and surviving both the global crisis
and increasing competition”.
EDITION 2009(1)  PAGE 5
Psychological bases for game­based learning
Graz, April:
TARGET’s partners include one of
Europe’s leading applied psychology
groups, TUG-KMI in Graz, Austria.
In TARGET, they are pioneering
extensions to a powerful approach to
modeling how high-level competence
depends on lower-level competence.
This is called Competence-based
Knowledge Space Theory (CbKST).
CbKST is the first of possibly several
theories of knowledge / learning that
will be applied to TARGET’s serious
game.
TUG-KMI organized a CbKST
workshop for the TARGET consor-
tium at the beginning of April at our
2nd project meeting in Graz. In that
way, the basics of CbKST and the
related microadaptivity-approach
were explained and the relevance and
integration in the TARGET-project
were outlined.
Michael Bedek of TUG-KMI kindly
summarized the key points for us,
consulting his colleagues Georg Otti
and Stephanie Linek. He explains:
“The CbKST is an extension of the
originally behavioristic Knowledge
Space Theory (KST) where every
knowledge domain is characterized
by a set of problems.
The goal of the KST is to assess the
so called knowledge state of the
learner in an efficient way. The
knowledge state of a learner is identi-
fied by the subset of problems this
person is capable of solving. Due to
Bringing it all together 
We aim to provide individuals and
enterprises with a learning environ-
ment that is more effective than what
is available today. An important part
of our approach is integration with
the Human Resource Management
systems used in companies, to bring
the TARGET approach inside or-
mutual dependencies between the
problems captured by prerequisite
relations, not all potential knowledge
states will occur.
The basic idea of the CbKST is to
assume a set of competences (skills,
abilities, knowledge) underlying the
problems of the domain. Similar to
the problems, the competences are in
some form dependent to each other
too, thus not every potential compe-
tence state occur.
The relationships between the com-
petences and problems are estab-
lished by a function. Such function
assigns a collection of subsets of
competences (i.e., competence states)
to each problem, which are relevant
for solving it.
The outlined approach has several
advantages:
On the one hand, given the perform-
ance, that is, the subset of problems
a learner could master and/or the
actions a learner shows in a game
scenario, the latent underlying com-
petences can be identified.
On the other hand, effective compe-
tence development can be realized
through adaptive individual learning
paths based on assumed prerequisite
relations.
A further development in this area is
the so-called microadaptivity-
approach which is of special impor-
tance for game-based learning since it
enables an adaptive assessment and
ganizations. Various communities
will support the learning process,
including a community of mentors to
advise learners.
Contact Person:
ANDERSEN, BJØRN
Tel: +47-73590561
the provision of adaptive interven-
tions without disturbing the game-
play.
In the context of technology en-
hanced learning (TEL) respectively
learning management systems,
CbKST was already successfully
adapted within the former EC-
project (6th framework) iClass.
The main goal of the iClass project
was to develop an intelligent cogni-
tive-based open learning system and
environment, adapted to individuals
in pre-university education.
In the context of game-based learn-
ing, CbKST has already proved its
effectiveness in the EC-project (6th
framework) ELEKTRA.
Thereby CbKST and the derived
microadaptivity-approach were an
integrative part of the ELEKTRA-
methodology which was presented at
the WEBIST-conference at 24th
March 2009 in Lisbon (see also
http://www.webist.org/2009/
index.htm ).
Within TARGET the CbKST and
the microadaptivity-approach will be
further enhanced and adapted as one
of the driving learning strategies
guiding the competence development
of individuals.
Other projects supported by the FP7
framework in which the CbKST
and/or the microadaptivity-approach
will be applied are MedCAP, 80Days,
GRAPPLE and ROLE.”
Fax: +47-73597117
Email: Bjorn.Andersen@sintef.no
Organisation:
STIFTELSEN SINTEF
STRINDVEIEN 4
7465 TRONDHEIM
NORWAY
 The TARGET partners 
Lead Organisation:
STIFTELSEN SINTEF
STRINDVEIEN 4
7465 ~ TRONDHEIM
NORWAY
Contact Person:
ANDERSEN, BJØRN
Tel: +47-73590561
Fax: +47-73597117
Email: Bjorn.Andersen@sintef.no
Discussion space on LinkedIn 
TARGET now hosts a discussion
space on LinkedIn. Please join us:
Austria:
SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT OESTERREICH
TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET GRAZ
Finland:
HELSINGIN KAUPPAKORKEAKOULU (Helsinki School of Economics)
NOKIA OYJ
Ireland:
CYNTELIX CORPORATION LIMITED
Italy:
GIUNTI LABS S.R.L.
UK:
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Norway:
SINTEF (coordinator)
NORGES TEKNISK - NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET
Portugal:
ALFAMICRO-SISTEMAS DE COMPUTADORES, LDA
INESC ID - INSTITUTO DE ENGENHARIA DE SISTEMAS E
COMPUTADORES, INVESTIGAÇAO E DESENVOLVIMENTO EM
LISBOA
INSTITUTO SUPERIOR TÉCNICO
http://bit.ly/reachyourtarget