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Knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, has gained more and more attention in recent years. The author claims that, with the development of information technology, more knowledge sharing takes place online rather than face-to-face. The purpose of this study is to explore how tacit knowledge is externalized in online environments. To answer this question, the author did a qualitative case study with an online course management system to collect and analyze the data. The results showed that in an online environment, sharing one's own experience is the most effective way for people to share their tacit knowledge. Further suggestions can help support the design and development of effective online environments to facilitate online externalization of tacit knowledge.
PURPOSES OF THE STUDY
Knowledge is increasingly regarded as the critical resource of firms and economies (Quinn, 1992). Knowledge is not only an intellectual object accumulated by experience and learning activities but also a process of structuring, interpreting, and contextualizing information which allows it to be used later in interpretation, action, and decision making for specific purposes (Bladder, 1995). Therefore, knowledge is structured information, while information is organized data.
Picture yourself driving a car, riding a bicycle, typing on a keyboard: you know how to do those things so well that you do not actually have to know how to do them; you just do them (Durrance, 1998). It is tacit knowledge that lives in our bodies, muscles, intuition, emotions, values, and beliefs. Recent attention has been focused on the importance of tacit knowledge for sustaining firms' competitiveness (Hall, 1993), for its role in technological innovation and organizational learning (Nonaka, 1991), and on the question of how to externalize tacit knowledge to be explicit to others within the organization (Nonaka, 1991, 1994; Durrance, 1998).
With the development of information technology and the emergence of intranet, more and more interactions are online rather than face-to-face. Thus we need to understand the importance of using knowledge and information through the use of online networks. In online environments, how might tacit knowledge be externalized? The purpose of this study is to explore this question.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
This study is guided by the following research question: How is tacit knowledge externalized in online environments?
"Externalize" here means to make tacit knowledge, explicit....