Sunday, 25 April 2010

From know-how to show -how?

Transfer of knowledge, about a variety of things, from one person or organization to another is not easy. Difficulty is inherent in knowledge transfer. This difficulty arises because of the problem transferring tacit knowledge (knowledge that can not be codified). A lot of methods can be used to transfer knowledge, such as a written report, memo, email, oral report or conversation. However, when a certain knowledge or procedure is to be transferred from individuals to another there would most likely be gaps in the information that has been transferred due to the inability of the individual who is providing the information that he/ she tacitly knows but fails to understand need to be transferred. Simply we know more than we can say or show.

When knowledge is more internal, subjective, more closely allied to being, we don't describe it in external space we start to attribute it as a dispositional quality of the speaker.

Finally I would like to question, does information and communication technologies in knowledge transfer favor only explicit knowledge (knowledge that can be codified and reduced to data)?
Does socialization help to transfer tacit knowledge? The reason I am asking this is that sometimes I think we learn or adopt things that can not be expressed or transferred. For example how to write a good academic paper, surely some elements of it can be learned but I think there is some tacit know how in it that can not be transferred easily but people manage to learn that as well.

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