Organizational Learning

"Organizational Learning refers to the capability of an organization to improve its effectiveness based upon its experience." Achieving organizational learning requires an enterprise-wide approach to knowledge management, distributed authorship, and ongoing documentation of protocol & procedure. There are various approaches to distributed authorship including content-management-systems, Microsoft SharePoint Server, and wikis. The bottom line is the "two heads are better than one" parable. As more and more people are involved in developing, publishing, and refining the organization's knowledge base, it becomes that much richer, up-to-date, and relevant. [The free encyclopedia wikipedia is a prime example of this phenomenon. Anyone on the net can contribute to it. Peers review the submissions. The wikipedia currently has 342,000 articles as compared to the Encyclopedia Britannica which has 85,000 articles.] In a school setting organizational learning relates to both administrative and instructional functions. Three areas worth examining are: curriculum mapping, student assessment, and web site authorship.