Theme 3: Crossing Interprofessional, Intercultural, and Interpersonal Boundaries in Knowledge Building Shared Resources: Collaboration and New Technologies

Knowledge productivity groups at the learning, education and training Institute of the Dutch Railways Frank de Jong, Dutch Railways-NS-Opleidingen-, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Poster Abstract December 2002 we started with so called Special Interest Groups (actually communities of practice). The aim is to connect daily work concerns of the learning advisors (N=21-25) of the Learning, Education and Training Institute (NS-Opleidingen) of the Dutch Rail to themes in our business plan: ‘Learning on the workplace’; Learning en performance Advising; Projectmanagement. The aim is that at the collective level NS-Opleidingen will be knowledge productive to related themes so the lead can be hold and taken in related projects as innovative thinkers. On the other hand the knowledge productive activities (KPA) in the SIG’s also have to contribute to the professionalism of our advisors. Knowledge Forum has been introduced but we still have some implementation activities related to technical, competence, attitude, time pressure and (control) management issues. At the same time we infused the KPA with intensive workshops around Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research. This was coached by WEB-Research for New Zealand. Some of the workshops were organized around a concrete pilot of learning-work-situation in the context of the basic driver learning traject. A model with essential issues of in the workplace learning emerged in an expanded way of learning. Our ultimate question now is how Knowledge Forum can support the SIG activities in the context of professional development and knowledge productivity of learning and performance advisors?