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- Experiential Learning
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EpistemologyFramework for categorizing knowledge. There are two kinds of knowledge — tacit and explicit. Tacit knowledge is personal, context-specific and difficult to formalize, document and articulate. Explicit knowledge can be transmitted in formal, systematic language. Experiential LearningLearning gathered and internalized by experience. Experience is considered life’s greatest teacher. In any company, people learn through experience. Experiential learning can be facilitated in various ways. One way is to institutionalize the “after action review” throughout the organization. Essentially, this is a structured approach to reviewing the learning from an initiative immediately after it is concluded. Another useful technique is Learning History, a detailed account of what happened during an important event, with accompanying analysis. Mentoring can also encourage experiential learning. Behavioral issues play a major role in experiential learning. Allowing learning from failure must be an integral part of a company’s culture. Otherwise, people will be reluctant to admit mistakes and share with their colleagues what went wrong. Expertise DirectoryA database of people and their skills to help users locate experts easily. An expertise directory is often referred to as “Yellow Pages”. When combined with a search engine, it becomes an expert locator. The effective functioning of expertise location systems depends on the quality of expert profiles uploaded on the database. Expert profiles are often up to date. Moreover, they may be incomplete and sometimes may also not tell the full story. Often, people do not articulate clearly what they know. So in many cases, expertise may have to be identified in other indirect ways. Expertise can sometimes be inferred from the contents of the documents with which a person’s name is associated. Authorship of a document indicates some familiarity with the subjects it discusses. Activities such as reading indicate some interest in the subject matter. The e-mails a person sends out can also be analyzed to write a profile of the person’s experience. Expertise can also be gauged by asking people whom they consult on specific issues. Expert SystemsIn case of straightforward business problems, we can create a set of rules or procedures to follow. A computer can be programmed to follow these rules/procedures. But the situation becomes more complex when the problems are less structured and the data is not well defined. Experts are needed to solve problems involving non-numeric data and complex inter relationships among the various factors. Special software programs called Expert Systems are an attempt to simulate these experts. Expert systems can analyze symptoms and identify the cause. Even when decisions are less complex, expert systems can speed up the decision making process and thereby improve customer satisfaction. Expert systems can also facilitate consistent decision making, i.e. reaching the same conclusion for the same basic situations. There are three types of expert systems:
There are some important drawbacks with expert systems. For one, they can be created only for specific and narrowly defined problems. When the problem is too complex with too many interactions and too many rules, it becomes difficult to explicitly express all the interrelationships. It is also not very easy to modify the knowledge base in an expert system. As the environment changes, the system has to be updated. If there are many rules in the system with various interrelationships, the system may have to be designed from scratch, resulting in heavy expenditure. Last but not the least, determining the rules can itself be a complicated process. To set up an expert system, people are needed who understand the process and can express the rules in a form that can be used by the system. Such people may not be all that easy to locate. (See also: Case Based Reasoning) Expert WorkA term coined by Tom Davenport while categorizing different kinds of knowledge work. Expert work refers to knowledge work that is largely individually done by experts. It is highly judgment oriented and dependent on individual expertise. Such work is difficult to structure. It is also difficult to get experts to use the knowledge of others. Yet, over time, it has been found that there is scope to use information technology to inject relevant knowledge into the work process as and when needed by the an expert. For example, a medical diagnostics system can provide relevant information, just before the physician is going to write the prescription. Explicit KnowledgeKnowledge that is documented in books, binders, databases, manuals and repositories. This type of knowledge can be articulated, codified and transmitted formally, in a systematic way. Explicit knowledge can be expressed in numbers, words or sound and shared in the form of data, scientific formulas, visuals, audio tapes, product specifications or manuals. For example, an SEI CMM V software company can lay down clearly how software development processes must be carried out. Similarly, a quality manual can indicate how food must be prepared and served in a fast food restaurant. New employees can visit the company’s intranet and familiarize themselves with the organization chart, performance appraisal system, profiles of different business units and their activities. Explicit knowledge is amenable to the use of information technology. (See also: Codification) Directory: books books -> The English Arrive in America books -> Active Vocabulary books -> Books we finished XIV books -> The theology of the balaam oracles: a pagan diviner and the word of god books -> The rhetoric of the father books -> Sra: Imagine It!, Themes, Taking a Stand, Ancient Civilizations Ecology, Great Expectations, Earth in Action, Art and Impact, Level 6 books -> You Can If You Try Unit 7 Nonfiction books -> The tregenza family books -> Unconditional hatred Download 0.91 Mb. Share with your friends:
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