I spent yesteday at Henley Management College in a research workshop facilitated by Richard McDermott. We were exploring a number of research topics relating to the development, transfer and retention of expertise. We tabled a number of topics, including mentoring, aging workforce, knowledge harvesting and salvage, lifelong learning and communities… we’re going to have to focus!
Then I came across this recent post on Connectivism from Helen Nicol, who has talent for spotting good stuff in this arena.
Helen’s thesis is that “any community of of practice must have a mix of novices, experts and all those in between, which in itself has implications for the moderation or management of communities to gain the best result for organisations.”
…which is consistent with Wenger’s definition:
“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”
I wonder, though whether there are some limiting thresholds which illustrate Helen’s idea – a community with large gaps in the continuum of expertise can generate frustration, elitism, “dumb questions and smart flaming”; whilst a communtiy with access to a great diversity of expertise can remain untapped if not well facilitated.
With apologies to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, here’s an attempt to illustrate this…
September 23, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Chris, thanks for the mention, and I think you’re spot on with your graphic. The problem I find is that it’s difficult to control the membership of a community, particularly if you consider that the most effective communities tend to form naturally. The implications for community coordination become far greater when you start to try and manipulate membership in terms of levels of expertise. Something I’m still struggling with….
October 4, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Chris,I agree with your and Helen’s observation about cross levels of expertise. In my experience it is one of the main drivers of knowldge sharing within communities. After all, what use is it to ask a question if no one has the competence to respond? Cross discipline, cross geography, cross organizational unit are other strong drivers. Except in a few special cases, such as new hire communities, cross level of expertise makes it possibe for the overall knowedge of the community – it collective competence – to rise.
Within organization communities often have a group of “assigned” members – the more senior experts. In fact, in some contribution to the community is a requirement for advancement to the more senior levels. This has not only not been a problem, but they freqently say that the organizational expectation for participation makes it easier to find the time to participate.