Adapted from: Community Intelligence Labs, 2002.

Learners participate in learning experiences in cohorts of 25, facilitated by a faculty or mentor, as appropriate. Most of their interactions are with the other learners, the repository of learning objects and the knowledge management system. To acquire new insight, they interact with their primary faculty/ mentor, other faculty/ mentors who are available, and/or with artificial intelligence agents that synthesize responses based on past questions and answers on particular topics.

In upgrading the environmental sciences offering, the community of practice decided the extent of the upgrade, the changes in content and tradecraft to include, and the mechanisms for providing just-in-time knowledge. The knowledge management and instructional development staff provided insight on how to incorporate these materials into learning objects and the knowledge management system.

Unleashing Creativity and
Creating New Patterns of
Work and Learning

Communities of practice are deploying new technologies to enable new means of social interaction and coordination. Today, proof-of-concept versions of these new communities are being developed and refined. Over time, they will develop even greater amenity. These new communities combine powerful knowledge management tools with new interfaces and interactivity tools that make it easier to engage in a wide range of community activities. Examples such as Community Intelligence Labs (www.co-i-l.com) illustrate how they facilitate the community interaction process.

With time, the new forms of social interaction and coordination will unleash the creativity of the community members and the distributed intelligence that resides in communities of practice in tactic, explicit, and evolving forms.

In turn, this will enhance the new patterns of work and learning that will be emerging from advances in knowledge sharing. This circular process is self-reinforcing; new forms of social interaction, creativity, and patterns of work and learning accelerate the development and application of new technologies, which restart the cycle all over again.

Evolving a Distinctive
Knowledge Culture

While all enterprises have a distinctive knowledge ecology, they also are part of a greater knowledge ecology that extends beyond their boundaries. This knowledge ecology influences the enterprise knowledge culture, since successful enterprises must participate in knowledge sharing and exchange that transcends the boundaries of the enterprise. However, every enterprise knowledge culture has distinctive elements.