Bridges To Knowledge: A Blog by Barry Camson

Experience As A Teacher In Improving Knowledge Management

When I was first asked by the Knowledge Lab at the Defense Inteligence Agency (DIA) to develop and deliver a workshop on Cross-Cultural Knowledge Management, I was told of the importance of making the workshop experiential. Rather than utilizing stand-up training in which participants are lectured to about sharing knowledge across cultures, they wanted something that would provide unique experiences to people that would advance their learning and improve their future actions. The ultimate workshop did just that. It provided a variety of experiences to people that helped in a deep way to improve their skills in the realm of what I call sharing and absorbing knowledge across cultures.

The experiences in the workshop were developed to respond to issues identified in our data gathering in DIA as well as in a number of other US intelligence agencies. This post will refer to specific issues identified in the diagnosis, the experience that people gained at the workshop and how those experiences have enhanced knowledge sharing and absorption capabilities among participants.

A Bifurcated Relationship

The integrated focus on content and personal interaction in traditional collaboration is changing to a more bifurcated focus in a Web 2.0 environment where sharing content and personal interaction can exist separately. This has ramifications in terms of what are appropriate actions to support collaboration in a Web 2.0 environment.