The Long Tail

Web technonogy can go a long way to helping organisations facilitate social learning and harness that precious informal and tacit knowledge that lurks amongst all of those "knowledge workers."

Eric Sauve co-founder of Tomoye Corp puts forward a good case for the use of web technology as a means of supporting CoP's as both places of learning and knowledge management.

He quotes research that suggests 80% of adult learning takes place via informal learning outside the classroom and much of it is incresingly taking place on social networking web sites. I suggest this is a trend that can only conitue to grow as the Gen Y digital natives continue to increase as a percnetage of the total work force. I am also not suggesting that social netwroking sites are always used as tools of learning either.

Of particular interset is his reflections of the affects of CoP's in leveraging the "Long Tail" of knowledge management. The Long Tail (reffered to in an earlier post) concerns the statistical distribution of information due to the rise in web technology and the internet.


Now with CoP's this once web based phenomenom can be transferred to knowledge management in organisations. Instead of organisations only producing and disseminating significant core information produced by the few, through CoP's information flow can now be about less core or niche, but still important, information being harvested and diseminated by the many as well.

Of course web 2.0 features like tagging, social bookmarking, wiki's, and topic specific blogs are a cheap and easily accessed platforms that by their very nature capture the knowledge of the many and sort it.

A great example of Web 2.0 not only supporting CoP's but helping shape CoP's.



Resource
Sauve, E. Communities of Practice as Learning and KM Strategy. Retrieved 4/12/07 from http://astd2007.astd.org/PDFs/Handouts%20for%20Web/M213.pdf