W. Snyder, Jan 1999. W. Snyder, 1997. It s a helpful introduction to the topic and a good beginning for anyone designing a new-economy learning organization. Most organizations fall short when they try to reinvent themselves as learning organizations. It fails to recognize one of the most natural of all learning processes, learning through interactions and relationships in networks of others who are experiencing and working on the same challenges and tasks.
People learn in communities of other people working on the same things.
They learn from other people, and consciously or unconsciously teach other members, through a matrix of relationships and social exchanges. They learn from situations that arise in those communities, and through the joint conversations, they engage in about problems to be solved. The traditional school model labors under two assumptions that are flawed as a universal prescription for acquiring new knowledge. The first is that learning involves loading up people s brains with information, like gasoline into a car engine. The second assumption is that learning only takes place in the context of formal education events such as training classes or on-line teaching modules.