I was debating whether to post this on Multilitteratus (since it is ID related), or if I should post it here - guess who won ;-)

I was reading an article on ASTD learning circuits the other day called Learning 2.0 and Workplace Communities which reminded me of my knowledge management class - the one I took many moons ago while an MBA student.

In this article Dave writes about the three models of using social media in workplace learning. The ultimate model is the community model, which reminds me of the discussions we had in Knowledge Management of trying to get people, in the company, involved with both using things like knowledge bases to retrieve information and also to contribute solutions to these knowledge bases to help out their colleagues. In other words you were taking the water cooler troubleshooting (and in a lot of cases information giving) and moving that to an online medium.

Of course, as we see in real life, and as we discussed in class oh-so-many-moons-ago, while people do freely give out information like this at the water cooler, they aren't always motivated to do so. Perhaps it's such a different paradigm that they don't see the value of it.

I think that the embedded model (see article) is probably a good model to use to get people's feet wet. If you require people to use a specific system (be it community, knowledge base, whatever), they might say "no-way, no-how" to using it. If you provide alternative avenues for getting content, but at the same time use social media for value added content, you will get some people used to the system, and you can empower users to experiment without feeling that they are messing up their only way of getting information - fear of failure is a big deterrent.

Overall, it was an interesting article - which I wish was published a few years ago - it would have made discussion in class much more exciting (it was an exciting class, but you can never have too much excitement in a 7pm class)