Stephanie Allen from Brightham-Young university is starting a research about virtual communities as learning networks. Before the work, which has started just recently, she asked three questions to be answered:
- 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?
There's different streams in the questions being asked; shifting from the basics of individual learning processes to CoP value principles to the business side of communities. A 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.
This is the link or bridge between the Knowledge/Learning (east) pole and the Social pole (south) I drew out to Heidi form Novell Wednesday (it's also blogged here). Stephanie's research then shifts to the left to the business side of communities..
Unfortunately the context that is created by asking "how organizations can support communities so people can do their job well" takes out the sharp edges: communities are organisms, not toolsets, and have the potential to increase value to the organization and the individual, and to co-evolve collectively. Don't settle for what you can do today. Think about what you could do tomorrow.
This happened at 5:54:53 PM or
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