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Learning communities that sustain themselves over long periods engage in these activities naturally. Members are simply curious about one another’s opinions and know others appreciate their contributions. If learners are engaged in productive conversation without you, avoid the temptation to get caught up in the role of emcee. Ultimately, the goal is to create a learning community that sustains itself with minimal intervention from the learning designer.

Consider the scoring strategy Yahoo! Answers uses to award points to its members. New users start with 100 points, the ability to ask up to five questions a day, answer up to 20 questions a day, and comment on 10 answers a day. But if users want the ability to rate other answers with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” they have to earn another 150 points first. To earn those points, they could simply log in once a day for 150 days. If they choose to answer questions, however, they can earn 2 points per question, which would speed up the process. The quickest way to earn a lot of points is to provide the Best Answer for the question. When an Asker selects a Best Answer, the participant who wrote it gets 10 points, and additional points for each “thumbs up” rating from other users.

Even when we have information, we must use that information by applying it to our work before we can say we "know it." Until we use it, it remains information. Knowledge (Stage 3) comes from applying information to our work. This is the stage at which most company training programs fail -- too often the content of company training programs never gets applied to the employee's work. To me, this means that the investment in that training is totally wasted.

Wisdom (Stage 4), that most precious possession, comes from adding intuition and experience to knowledge.

This is why having a personal learning network is so important -- to provide us not only with pointers to sources of information, but to answer questions, to coach us, to reinforce our learning when we try to apply it to our work.

First, we must sort through all of the available data to find only that information that is relevant to our learning needs and for which we have a purpose.

Once we have gathered and learned the needed information, we need to apply it to our work in order to transform it into our personal knowledge.

Who should be in your personal learning network? The members of your network do not need to be people with whom you work directly. In fact, you do not even need to know the people personally. The members of your network should be people, both inside and outside of your work group and your company, who have the knowledge that you are trying to master and who are willing to share their knowledge and experience with you.

To establish a learning network, you can ask other people in your group, or with whom you have gone through a training program, to participate in periodic discussions as you all try to implement a new way of working, to support each other and share experiences with each other. Most people are happy to help -- people generally like to talk about their own work and are honored to be asked to share their knowledge and wisdom.

the value of knowledge increases when you share it with others.

Building a personal learning network is requires that you not only seek to learn from others, but also that you also help others in the network learn.

A personal learning network can be your most powerful learning tool no matter what the subject.