learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Peter Mkhize et al.
you’ve got your structured learning and unstructured learning so also contribute to that
unstructured learning ...
collaboration in terms of the different roles, to …, and that what’s exciting us, getting together
to work out a solution for the government we’ve had business analysts, we’ve
had the now the content developers ...
Proposition 3: The collaborative learning strategy should be encapsulated within the community of
practice where collaborators could share common interests, experiences and/or expertise, thereby
learning from each other by using appropriate instructional technology.
The primary objective of the communities of practice is to share experiences and knowledge, thereby
empowering colleagues in business – especially in the specialised business environment (Wenger
and Snyder 2000), which requires collaboration with experienced colleagues (Drinkwater et al. 2004).
Knowledge and skills sharing could be cross functional within the public sector, where interaction is
elevated through the levels of information sharing, to high-level competencies.
we need to engage with a department, so department x whether it’s Arts and Culture or
Home Affairs whatever, the SITA training department can engage with the department
and then setup a development plan that takes people from the basic skills required, basic
skills and basic knowledge through to the competence that you want in the end, ... to
the point where they are fully competent for their job and beyond, moving to the next
level ...
Within communities of practice, learning takes place through discovery of the facts and behaviours
that are useful to the improvement of current methods – to the extent that discovery incites changes in
the behaviour of the community (Li et al. 2001). One of the participants went on to say that collaboration
is a culture that has changed ways of doing business in the public sector. It has removed the silo
effect in the public sector, to enable sharing of best practices, so that everyone can learn from one
another.
think the main thing about collaboration in government is the culture is pretty much …so
everybody is busy with their own stuff, fighting their own battles and not knowing that another
department..., so collaboration for us is about creating the tool that can connect
these people so that they can form groups, networks of interests ...
Communities of practice could be interconnected, to allow the transfer of specialised skills from one
group to another, without formal coordinated learning programmes. However, this process is conducive
to a self-directed learning environment where individual learners know what they want to learn.
Such learners initiate the learning process that is directed at the achievement of situation-specific
learning.
so if you are in a social network ... there’s more than I think 14 groups already so they
are communities of practice because one the e-government group, ... I can be a member
of the government wide collaboration group as well as the e-government I’m actually a
part of 3 groups one I’m administrators the other one are I’m members ...
Proposition 4: Evaluate different social media to establish appropriateness for specific learning objectives,
then adapt one found to be appropriate to instructional design.
Self-directed learners would use any vehicle of knowledge transfer if it would help in achieving a specific
learning objective as required by the learner to fulfil their job responsibilities or to improve performance.
Communities of practice would then be useful for employees who want to gain an insight
into a specific knowledge area, and then probe beyond what is currently available in the forum. Learning
would take place without anxiety related to being in a classroom and getting ready to be tested.
Employees could navigate their way into different communities of practice, and then learn collaboratively
from peers.
5. Conclusion
Through grounded theory analysis, two themes emerged – namely: (1) Management and administration
of collaboration, and (2) learning through discovery. Collaboration proved to be the prevalent instructional
strategy in the public sector, as all participants agreed that collaborative learning would
help in paving the way for massive skills development, both in the public and private sectors. In addition
to that, participant agreed that collaboration would enable industry practitioners to develop the
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