AD-HOC Learning - Acquiring Skills on Demand - Know-Center

The workspace represents the user’s desktop PC and shared document storage devices such as a
common file structure or a document management system. It contains the work documents which are
needed by an employee on a day-to-day basis, such as project related documents. The workspace is
typically structured according to a company’s organization and task structures (such as project
structures).
The learning space stands for conscious learning situations, e.g. attending seminars and taking elearning
courses. The learning space is either completely outside any technical system or combined with
an e-learning platform. Sometimes information about available seminars is available through the
Intranet. The structure of the learning space mirrors the structure of the learning topics as it is seen by
course providers. It follows the didactical abstraction of the topic and provides generally no information
about the relationship of work tasks to courses. In addition, the available course material is fairly general
and has to be adapted to ones work context.
The knowledge space represents unconscious learning, application of past experiences (own and from
others) to new situations, spontaneous search for information and use of examples in order to
understand how to apply newly found information. The knowledge space of an organization is often
distributed over different systems such as the Intranet, a common file server, etc. Here the structure
again is different: Organizational knowledge often does not have one clear structure, but mirrors the
internal cognitive map of each person providing the knowledge. Often a mix of the organizations
processes, topics and department structures are found here.
Work <strong>Learning</strong>
Knowledge
4
Search
Figure 1: The three spaces, a typical work place consists of
Based on the above description of the three spaces we can identify two main problems when wanting to
link the spaces together and provide a bridge from everyday work to learning:
Cognitive and structural disconnection between the three spaces: Each of the spaces has an inherent
structure which mirrors to some extent the mental model of the people who are using it.
Technical separation of the three spaces: Each of the spaces is implemented on a different technical
platform.
The technical separation of the three spaces can be overcome by choosing a platform which can support
all three different spaces equally well. In the following case study we have chosen Hyperwave’s
knowledge management platform to implement the <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> approach because it is a unique platform
which readily provides support for document and content management, knowledge management and
collaboration, and e-<strong>Learning</strong>.
Worse than the technical separation of these three spaces however, is the first problem: The cognitive
disconnection between the spaces. It manifests itself in the evolution of totally different storage
structures – as described above. Knowledge as well as learning resources are not linked to work
documents and have a totally different structure than the work task. So, knowledge and documents exist
which could bridge the gap, but they are somewhere hidden in organizations’ IT-systems and networks
and lack the links to the work processes.
In order to provide a link between the three spaces and their structures, <strong>AD</strong>-<strong>HOC</strong> moves, as it is
schematized in Figure 2, the work process into the center of the worker’s focus. Work resources (e.g.
document templates, forms, work supporting-tools), knowledge resources (e.g. checklists, guidelines,