Epic Think Tank
Blending Learning and Knowledge Management
5. The convergence of learning and knowledge management
Perhaps the reason why the question of explicit and tacit knowledge
has not been such an important issue for the training community
before is that within the previous dominant pattern of organisational
learning - classroom - it tended not to come up.
The person who transferred the knowledge and the person who owned
it in the first place were almost always the same person - the trainer.
Very often the trainer acted as SME, instructional designer and
delivery mechanism all rolled into one.
However, the process of putting learning online is a team effort,
demanding specialisation and the division of labour. To create a
piece of e-learning, an SME (very often an in-house expert) will
work with a project team focused on instructional design (usually
outsourced) and delivery will be largely the responsibility of the
in-house IT department or the World Wide Web.
Classroom was never a scalable model. Organisations have grown
too large, too geographically dispersed and too diverse to rely
on what was always a rather hit-and-miss way of doing things, from
a quality point of view. The division of labour necessitated by
e-learning enables each part of the process to be quality controlled,
and the organisation's brightest brains to be more effectively leveraged.
Classroom training gets deconstructed, and reassembled with the
addition of new bionic parts.
However, we have to be sure that our blueprint for doing this
is not crude and overly simplistic. There is always the necessity
in digitising any human process that we pay attention to what escapes
the grid and can too easily get overlooked.
This risk becomes more acute as we ask e-learning to do more sophisticated
things. In its simple, unblended manifestation, it is a faster,
cheaper, better way of delivering relatively straightforward types
of knowledge-based training. But when addressing more complex areas
such as soft skills and attitudinal change, it often needs a re-infusion
of certain tacit components that spiced up the original, organic
mix.
Re-enter the trainer.
Old-school trainers, if they were worth their salt, always came
replete with a stock of anecdotes and up-to-the minute news to supplement
the rather frozen stuff on their PowerPoints - together with insights
drawn from personal experience. A lot of tacit and unofficial knowledge
got added to what was in the workbook this way (in fact the definition
of a mediocre trainer is one who just reads out the slides).
Blended learning has come about partly through recognising the
value of this tacit and unofficial knowledge. However it is no good
simply jamming wodges of old-fashioned classroom training together
with blocks of online learning and expecting the thing to scale.
The division of labour we talked about above is not about to get
undivided again.
The emerging practice of blended learning design is about ensuring
that the less explicit stuff really doesn't get lost - using elements
like peer collaboration, workshops and learner support.
This is one reason why the overlap with knowledge management is
now becoming so much more obvious. Designers of blended learning
programmes are moving into a very similar conceptual space to knowledge
managers, making judgements about how explict and tacit knowledge
interact.
What they do can look very similar too. The service that an outsourced
provider of blended learning provides on behalf of a client - defining
sources of expert knowledge, capturing that knowledge, refining
it and playing it back into the organisation with a different distribution
- looks very similar to our earlier model for knowledge management.
Plus... There is a whole new paradigm for organisational learning
that puts learners at the centre of the diagram. In this paradigm,
learners are increasingly being seen not only as consumers but also
providers of knowledge.
What used too often to be about putting people in training rooms
and showing them a load of bullet points is now about connecting
learners to a huge variety of possible sources and experiences -
as well as to other learners.
So as the shape of learning begins to change, it starts to look
more and more like KM. The concerns of the two disciplines converge.
And it seems that for both there is a shared interest in establishing
how, exactly, knowledge both explict and tacit functions within
the organisation - which turns out to have a great deal to do with
building an appropriate knowledge culture.
Next>>
Intro: Sven, VBM and the book under
the counter
1. The personality of knowledge
2. Making the tacit explicit
3. Learning from war stories
4. The book under the counter
5. Reward systems in the culture club
6. Modelling the tall poppy
7. Value based management and Sven's
men
8. The Odyssey as quality manual
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