Thursday 5 April 2007

Extacifying Knowledge - Putting Learning into Practice

I had a chat with an old school friend on my daily commute home this evening, introducing him to knowledge management.

He is currently completing an MBS in Human Resource Management at the UCD Michael Smurfit School of Business in Dublin, Ireland.

He is preparing a presentation next week on how to provide a strategy that allows individuals to practically apply what they learn in training courses.

This is when I started describing the explicit - tacit conundrum, which I based this blog on. He was not familiar with KM, and this surprised me, as I feel there are many applications of KM in the domain of HR, and specifically in the usage of Web 2.0 technologies in collaborative learning.

I have experienced this myself in my short career. I have completed training that I have not since used in my job role. This may be frustrating, but is there a solution?

Individuals should be able to track and choose the "learning path" which best suits them. Of course, there are always exceptions when trying to roll out an enterprise strategy of this kind (e.g. Technical, compliance & regulatory training).

In the future, it will be interesting to see the learning traits and needs of the "bebo" generation. Will HR learning staff have to evolve the delivery methods of such training to meet the expectations of young professionals born post 1990?

For instance, I thought the experiment with the delivery of education using iPods and iTunes at Stanford University was particularly interesting.

I think that m-learning (mobile learning) will have a big part to play in the future of education, considering the popularity of You-Tube and iTunes etc.

Sunday 1 April 2007

Extacit - What's in a name?

The aim of this blog is to "extacify" what I learn during my MSc study and to gather my thoughts on all things KM

So where did "Extacit" come from? - Well, it comes from explicit and tacit knowledge.

Explicit knowledge - "is knowledge that has been or can be articulated, codified, and stored in certain media. It can be readily transmitted to others. The most common forms of explicit knowledge are manuals, documents and procedures." - wikipedia

Tacit Knowledge - "is knowledge that people carry in their minds and is, therefore, difficult to access. Often, people are not aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Tacit knowledge is considered more valuable because it provides context for people, places, ideas, and experiences. Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact and trust." - wikipedia

So, I want to turn all that is taught to me, explicit knowledge, into something that I can pass on to others, tacit knowledge, therefore "extacifying" the content?