I’ve been in that position several times in my career and the conversations just don’t get easier. At one point a supervisor, in a training department, noted my performance evaluation with “seems to be using the Internet during work hours”.

Yikes!

This note, and several other comments, came at times when I was boundary spanning to gain knowledge for the betterment of the company, my own instruction, and the industry. It shows the lack of vision and perception people have of true professionals.

Your participation in CoP’s is vital to maintaining your motivation, drive, and performance. External CoP’s provide the most benefit, as internal ones are often so insetutious that they provide little gain over the status quo.

It wasn’t until I befriended a senior IT leader that my problems were corrected. His own participation beyond the firewall far outweighed anything I was doing and his advocacy ultimately helped my defense of being a true professional.

Since then, I find information to bring to my groups often and make a note of saying, “I got this from __________”. It helps people to understand the value of being on the edges of the organization.

Mike

On the one hand I think there was a territorial issue here on the part of the consultant.

But I think the biggest problem was that this organization’s knowledge management system, which they were promoting its use and which is just dressed up as a knowledge transfer system, just doesn’t accommodate the idea of collecting contexts which provide real meaning.

So here I am, just innocently Googling something for my oldest on CUA’s policies for admitting homeschoolers - and I come across your site! Good stuff, Lurch!

Annette

It boils down to (in my own humble opinion) how to use and being comfortable in using any tool - whether it is Wikipedia or any other platform/tool that involves an active body of contributors. If a teacher is not sure or nor comfortable using these tools, then it is likely she/he will rule against its use in class or for reports or projects.

Encyclopedia Britannica as an example of an accurate reference.

For its study, Nature chose articles from both sites in a wide range of topics and sent them to what it called “relevant” field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles–one from each site on a given topic–side by side, but were not told which article came from which site. Nature got back 42 usable reviews from its field of experts.

In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts, in the articles. Of those, four came from each site. They did, however, discover a series of factual errors, omissions or misleading statements. All told, Wikipedia had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123.

That averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.

Nihiltres - thanks for your thoughts (way cool that you’re a Wikipedia contributor!). I think you’re spot on about teaching HOW to use Wikipedia well. Thanks.

And I would agree that training is not always the best way; although it does seem to be the one most advocated for by management. A key challenge however is being given the necessary time to do a really good analysis up front. (But there’s nothing from stopping us doing things concurrently - where we have continue to do an analysis in more detail as needed while beginning a design).