Mathemagenic

Erik van Bekkum does a great job with bringing many Knowledge Board discussions into blogosphere. Recent links:

• Culture and communities of Practice
• Miguel Cornejo and the community-building tool overview 
• Coffee talk, a thousand miles away at Shell (btw, great example of coffee-table teleconferencing :)

[See also Blogs vs. KnowledgeBoard discussion]

Erik van Bekkum points to a new weblog by Stephanie Allen, which is related to a study on Virtual Communities as Learning Networks. This study will try to answer the following questions:

• How do employees learn in order to do their jobs well?
• How can virtual communities help employees learn to do their job well?
• What can organizations do to support virtual communities so that employees can do their job well? 
• What do organizations gain from supporting virtual communities?

Erik comments:

The question that may be missing is about how the collective learning in a community takes place, and it's impact on the individual learning process. Just recently I was talking about this (yes, at the coffee machine) with Ad Dekkers. if you consider the increase of individual capabilities through collective learning and collective capabilities, you have a better understanding of how the community adds value to the learning process of each participant in the community.

My few cents:

1. Nice to see more e-learning/training people looking at communities of practice as a learning environment.

2. I recognise dialogues that I hear often then learning and KM people get together in a discussion about learning in communities: learning people stress individual learning while KM people say how and why group-collective-organisational learning is important. Sometimes they talk about the same thing without understanding each other. I believe (and some theories say) that learning is always social. From this perspective the nature of learning in a classroom and learning in a community are not so different, the difference is in a degree of steering/facilitation.

3. If I would do this study (and I'm studying related things anyway :) I would:

• check studies of informal learning first, especially those explaning how it happens and how it can be supported (some references are here, especially [1] and [2])
• focus on performance-improvement (in other words on the whole chain share-learn-apply at work; I address it as a performance-focused knowledge sharing in I-KNOW paper)
• and then add KM-world knowledge about communities 

In other words, this study could be a good way to get best from both training and KM worlds: understanding how people learn, how to facilitate learning and performance change as well as understanding communities as living systems.

Looking forward to see where this study goes.

Future-proof URLs in Movable Type [via Roland Tanglao: KLogs] - if I decide to move...

Back to everyday morning routine: breakfast, e-mail, newsaggregator. And half an hour before I find out how much work is waiting for me in the office :)