Organizational Development for Knowledge Management at Water ...

INDIVIDUAL LEARNING
Professional Development Day. A day designated to focus on a specific skill set that will
help utility employees hone and polish that skill set. Also effective when new tools or
processes are being implemented. Scheduled regularly and structured to provide continuing
education units for participating professionals.
Podcast. A podcast relates to the terms iPod and broadcast, and refers to a series of
digital-media files that are distributed via the Internet and can be played back on portable
media players and computers. While the term emerged in reference to syndicated and
subscribed to content, it can also be used to describe aural learning sequences developed
by a Utility and distributed to Utility employees. Podcasts have been used for distribution of
school lessons, audio tours of museums, conference meeting updates and by police
departments to distribute public safety messages.
Second Life. Virtual worlds are 3D immersive, persistent environments where people meet,
interact, make friends, and accomplish tasks. They are powerful learning tools. Launched
by Linden Las in 2003, Second Life now has 8 million residents (40,000 active at any one
point) with a growth rate of more than 20 percent per month (adding 25,000 members per
day). Gartner has forecast that 80 percent of active Internet users and Fortune 500
companies will participate in a virtual world by 2011. NASA has four thrusts for virtual
worlds: mission support (modeling and simulation, collaboration, proposal development,
and more), outreach (public engagement and participation), education (K-12 learning) and
training (internal). For example, NASA designed live-action learning modules that give
players the chance to experiment with orbital mechanics, the principles of spaceflight and
other space-related subjects. These are used as learning devices for people of all ages.
Other uses might include: participating in company events such as town halls, promoting
new standards, virtual interview events by major corporations or creating weather maps to
model pandemics. Drinking water utilities could use Second Life to practice response
scenarios to contaminants and help develop skill sets in young engineers for contingency
planning.
Wikipedia. The Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia project, is an example of open source
computing. The name is a derivation of wiki (a collaborative web site) and encyclopedia.
The content for Wikipedia is contributed by volunteers around the world, and can be edited
by anyone with access to the Internet. See Wiki for more detailed examples.
Book Learning—The Active Way. Instead of passively reading a book and then trying to
remember what was written, much more learning takes place if a proactive approach is
taken. This approach prompts the reader to energize their own thinking and improve their
understanding of the information in the book. For example, when the reader comes across
a sentence or paragraph that is new and relevant to their learning, they would underline that
material and put starts (one to four) in the side margin based on how important the material
was judge to be to the reader. One star denotes interest; four stars denotes extremely
important. This does several things. First, underlining forces the reader to think about the
sentence some length of time (a second or longer) and the repetition as it is read over helps
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