The Social Nature of Work Fragmentation: Revisiting Informal Workplace Communication

The Social Nature of Work Fragmentation: Revisiting Informal Workplace Communication

Informal workplace communication is a central component of work and fundamental to understand its fragmentation. Previous studies point to external interruptions and multi-tasking preferences as the source of work fragmentation. Yet, although some empirical evidence exists on the role played by social informal interactions on interrupting work, we lack a more precise understanding of the degree...

Informal learning in work environments: training with the Social Web in the workplace

The Internet and its increasing usage has changed informal learning in depth. This change has affected young and older adults in both the workplace and in higher education. But, in spite of this, formal and non formal course based approaches have not taken full advantage of these new informal learning scenarios and technologies. The Web 2.0 is a new way for people to communicate across the Inte...

The Nature and Purposes of Social Work

Informal learning in the workplace

This paper focuses mainly on theoretical frameworks for understanding and investigating informal learning in the workplace, which have been developed through a series of largeand small-scale projects. The main conclusions are included but readers are referred to other publications for more detailed accounts of individual projects. Two types of framework are discussed. The ®rst group seeks to de...

KnowBrain: An Online Social Knowledge Repository for Informal Workplace Learning

We present KnowBrain (KB), an open source Dropbox-like knowledge repository with social features for informal workplace learning. KB enables users (i) to share and collaboratively structure knowledge, (ii) to access knowledge via sophisticated contentand metadatabased search and recommendation, and (iii) to discuss artefacts by means of multimedia-enriched Q&A. As such, KB can support, integrat...