Donald Tapscott is the author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I happen to be in the middle of that book. I thought it came out about a year ago, but it was only five months ago.
What Learning 2.0 is really about is collaborating. Give a little, take a little. I have knowledge, you have knowledge, we share knowledge. Hording – bad. Sharing – good.
The economics of knowledge sharing have changed. It has to do with ‘transactional costs’. What were the costs? Look at the Training Department. I used to run a training department for 650 people. Zero budget and only one person – me. It was difficult to give people what they wanted. For example, the Customer Care team had a lot of knowledge that they wanted to spread within their group and that other departments wanted to tap. Being the training manager I was to help with that spreading. But there was only me. I had to find it, format it and deliver it in one form or another.
The game has changed. No longer am I bound by high transactional costs. That is swallowed up in collaboration. The barrier is rapidly diminishing. With that rapid decline it begs the question, ‘What can you now create that you could not create before because of the high costs?’
Suddenly, the new person can be an expert in a much shorter time than usual. Suddenly, the ‘consumers’ of information become the ‘prosumers’. They create the information that the training department used to create.
What! What about authenticity? How do you know that the information is correct if we give the creation to each worker? For the answer, we turn to Wikipedia. It has eclipsed Encyclopedia Britannica by a long shot. And, on top of it, it stays relevant and up to date. If something is wrong, someone else will correct it. In fact, it is as correct as Encyclopedia Britannica.
For collaboration to work, there MUST be a goal. Collaboration to collaborate won’t work. There must be a good reason and in the learning community we have plenty of them.
