Sharing Expertise: Challenges for Technical Support

Knowledge is an important resource in economy these days. It is typically distributed among different actors and embodied in various artefacts (cf. Saloman 1993; Hutchins 1995; Ackerman and Halverson 1998). So, on the level of national economies as well as on the level of an individual organizations, it is important to find innovative ways to stimulate learning by sharing knowledge among humans. There are mainly two - often intertwined - ways on how to share knowledge. On the direct way, human actors of different kinds of expertise can communicate and help each other to construct new knowledge. On the second, mediated way, the actors with a higher level of expertise can create artifacts, that may initiate and facilitate knowledge construction processes of others.[...]