A community of practice brings together people who share expertise, problems, responsibilities, or professional interests and enables them to exchange knowledge through ongoing interaction. For an organization composed of technical experts, this is particularly useful because much valuable expertise may be tacit and difficult to capture fully in documents.
Repositories and job aids already address explicit knowledge. A community of practice adds the interpersonal mechanism through which experts can discuss unusual problems, explain judgment, compare approaches, share lessons learned, and collectively develop better practices.
A blog can distribute information and allow comments, but it generally offers less sustained collaborative structure. An electronic performance support system provides point-of-need assistance but does not inherently create a peer knowledge-sharing community. Mobile learning is a delivery channel rather than a knowledge-sharing structure.
Communities of practice strengthen organizational learning by connecting people with both information and one another. Over time, they can generate new knowledge, improve existing practices, preserve expertise, and reduce duplication of problem-solving effort across the organization.
Study Guide Topics: Knowledge Management; communities of practice; tacit knowledge; peer learning; knowledge sharing.
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