ONLINE SCIENTIFIC DISSEMINATION OF KNOWLEDGE BLENDED WITH FACE-TO-FACE LEARNING Svend Tveden-Nyborg, Ph.D. Fellow, Aarhus University Forsøgsvej 1, DK 4200 Slagelse, Denmark, Svend.Tveden-Nyborg@agrsci.dk ABSTRACT Danish seed scientists want to disseminate their knowledge to the Danish seed industry to educate consultants, growers, and students and to improve their skills and knowledge about seed production. Interviews and workshop activities have been conducted to analyze both the current information flow between the seed scientists, seed consultants, and the seed growers, and the requirements for a knowledge website for learning new seed science. This paper describes the specification requirements set for the required website including taxonomized hierarchical meta-tagging, RSS, legal matters, together with limitations and potentials. However, selecting online communication media as a dissemination tool for a community comes with a challenge – among other things it risks creating a learning divide between fast and slow learners. According to the theoretical framework “Diffusion of Innovation” [1] innovation is experienced differently throughout a society due to fast and slow adopters. Blending online learning with face-to-face experience will strengthen the learning curve among the targeted users and ensure a faster dissemination of knowledge and thus learning to the entire community. KEY WORDS Online dissemination of knowledge, learning divide, blended learning, communities of practice 1. Introduction In today‟s information society where one is continuously bombarded with information via all kinds of information media, it is not so much a question about knowing all about the universe but more a question about knowing where to find the knowledge about the universe that one needs. Knowledge, innovation, information, learning, dissemination, diffusion, and communication are all keywords in a recent Danish research project on communicating seed science to practitioners. Danish seed scientists find themselves in a unique situation when compared with other agronomic scientists, in that their links to the seed practice (i.e. seed consultants, seed advisors, and seed growers) are based on a particularly close relationship. [2] A current Ph.D. project, which objective it is to strengthen seed practitioners‟ learning uptake of scientists‟ knowledge dissemination, emphasizes on improving the knowledge collaboration even further by introducing new dissemination technologies. Based on interviews obtained in 2010 and a workshop in 2011 a web-based knowledge portal has been designed, developed, and launched. It is the aim of this paper to describe the considerations and reflections that have gone into the creation of this new website. One of the reasons for setting up the Ph.D. project has been to blend current knowledge and learning research within the platform of a “normal” website, and through the literary journey providing new insight into an improved use of scientific dissemination – i.e. via electronic media such as the Internet. In 2010 we conducted 26 explorative interviews with members of the Danish seed industry. They included scientists, company consultants and advisors, as well as growers. The aim of the interviews was to investigate how scientific knowledge was disseminated in the network. Viewing the Danish seed community from Wenger‟s Communities of Practice‟s (CoP) [3-5] , the industry can be described as a constallation of CoP interweaving between one another [6] . Scientists constitute one CoP, consultants another, and growers a third. In addition, the network dialogue between scientists and consultants can also be seen as a CoP together with the growers‟ experience exchange groups constituting another. However, despite this interweaving web of CoP, only scarce amounts of scientific knowledge were disseminated directly between the scientists and the growers. We discovered a divergence in knowledge dissemination among the growers – an innovative group of growers with a high demand for new scientific knowledge versus a majority of growers who were content with the level of knowledge provided by the consultants. „Time‟ was recognized as an important parameter as only the innovative growers prioritized time allocation for additional knowledge search. We concluded that face-to-face knowledge dissemination works well in Danish seed communities of Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference Web-based Education (WBE 2013) February 13 - 15, 2013 Innsbruck, Austria DOI: 10.2316/P.2013.792-036 859