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It is vital that new employees can quickly use and contribute to the collective knowledge of the organisation. A new
graduate works with her guidance team to define a set of key goals and chart a learning and development pathway
to achieve them. This process is supported by emergent technologies that capitalise on the collective wisdom of the
organisation and expose existing learning trails and resources.
Charting The guidance team and individual employee work closely to record her prior knowledge and
experience, current strengths and competence gaps relating these to personal and organisational
goals. The individual can then identify learning and development opportunities using personal
learning management tools that dynamically link to and expose collective knowledge resources.
Consumption To browse new learning opportunities which meet her learning needs, the employee can search the
collective knowledge base within and outside the company. Some of these may be formal courses,
but others will be organisational resources or learner contributed reflections which describe how
others have met similar goals.
Connection Once goals have been defined and learning opportunities and pathways discovered, the learner can
begin to connect with other individuals in the organisation. In some cases, the learner may wish to
communicate with other individuals who have achieved similar goals to ask them to elaborate on
their experience. In other cases, a learner may choose to contact other learners who are working
towards similar goals to share experiences and provide/benefit from peer support. Connection may
be through traditional mechanisms (such as email and telephone) but may also use other tools such
as virtual worlds.
Contribution As part of her practice, the learner will reflect on her achievements towards the goals she has set,
providing details about how goals were achieved and how useful individual resources and
opportunities have been. This new knowledge enriches the collective knowledge (reports and other
evidence of achievement), reinforcing successful learning pathways and enhancing the company
knowledge base.
A key process for all employees is to establish their position in the organisation, defining expectations, assessing
existing competencies and matching these to the needs of their current and anticipated future role. In this example,
the learner is empowered to take an active part in negotiating her learning goals, taking ownership of personal
development priorities.
Using emergent technologies such as aggregators and recommender systems to extend existing PDP tools enables
the individual to discover how others have achieved similar goals moving beyond formal courses and other
structured learning opportunities that are the focus of existing PDP solutions. These technologies support
multimode, retrievable, reflective, embedded and pervasive communication to enable rich interaction with the
collective knowledge base.
To enable this, the organisation must create a culture of reflection and openness of knowledge, where the
mechanism of ‘How learning goals are achieved’ is captured in the knowledge base and made retrievable. This body
of knowledge will take time to develop and it is anticipated that implementation of such a system would have to be
restricted initially to new recruits, following the initial group as they progress through the organisation.
As a result, the learning processes become more efficient as the best ways to achieve specific goals become known
and shared. Understanding learning pathways within the organisation allows learning designers to better plan formal
learning provision and advise new employees as they enter the career planning process.
Littlejohn, Margaryan, Milligan (2007): http://caledonianacademy.blogspot.com/
EXAMPLE 2: Consuming and Contributing to Collective Knowledge
A senior employee must develop new competencies in order to solve a novel problem or innovate within her team.
She must develop a dynamic capability to consume, create and share new knowledge needed to solve these complex
problems. Such development needs are rarely met through formal courses alone, but resources and expertise may
exist within the organisation. Enhancing information flow and discovery throughout the organisation can prevent the
same problems being solved over and over again.
Consumption As part of her daily routine, a senior employee is exposed to the activity within the organisation
through subscription to RSS feeds from company web logs, developing a network of trusted
resources and sources suited to her own needs. The employee can also search through the
company wide knowledge base to discover, organise and annotate new resources when required.
Connection Social networking tools complement existing communication and knowledge sharing tools,
providing additional opportunities for discovering new contacts and establishing contextualised
links. These tools make it easy to link content and author, providing a simple route to contact
through embedded channels (blog commenting, Instant messaging) as well as traditional tools such
as email and telephone.
Contribution The employee reflects through her own communication channels and in doing so contributes to the
company knowledge base. In addition, as she finds, utilises and links resources, the employee
further enriches the collective knowledge of the organisation.
Within the organisation, it is common for senior employees to face new challenges in the form of unexpected
problems or a desire to innovate. In a large organisation, expertise which may be relevant may already reside within
the organisation. An individual can not hope to know the expertise of all other senior employees, so sometimes the
same problems are solved repeatedly by the organisation.
By encouraging a culture of reflective practice, the organisation can record the expertise within the organisation
much more effectively. Staff are encouraged to reflect on their practice through weblogs and wikis and make (non
sensitive) documents public (internally to the organisation) so that others may benefit from their insight. The
resources become a knowledge base for the whole organisation.
Skills in using the knowledge base develop over time – with expert users gaining an intuitive feel for the value of
resources based on information such as: who found a resource useful (reputation); in what context was it originally
used; whether the resource has been consistently useful to a number of users; whether the resource is still being
seen as useful (for instance, useful resources which precipitated a culture change within the organisation may
themselves cease to be of everyday value, and this will be reflected in usage data.
In contrast to adding formal metadata, encouraging informal annotation of resources through reflective weblog
posts, commenting and tagging of resources can provide a rich set of secondary metadata.
RSS feed discovery and tracking would be managed by existing groupware solutions such as MS Outlook. Reflective
practice through weblogs would also make use of existing solutions. If no cross‐organisational blogging platform
exists, then a system such as ELGG could be implemented. ELGG allows the creation of formal groups, as well as
groups which are informally established through common goals or interests.
Although the knowledge base is most useful for senior employees, the benefits can be extended across the
organisation as less senior employees are exposed to the culture and working practices of senior managers. Over
time, the information within the organisation comes out of individual employees’ heads and computers, and enters
into the collective consciousness of the organisation.
Littlejohn, Margaryan, Milligan (2007): http://caledonianacademy.blogspot.com/