The Academy of Wine

Note: One area of Learning and Development that we are interested in further exploring is that of “Social Learning”, which is when a group of people who share an interest in a particular topic develop their own learning through research and exploration, and in the process share that knowledge with others – creating a Learning Community. This post by Sanda Manuila presents our first foray into this area of collaborative learning. On to Sanda's post...Rob Hennigar.

I love wine. I love tasting wine, I love conducting winetastings for my co-workers here at Robert Mondavi Winery, especially when we get the opportunity to discover new wines. Aromatic white wines have become so popular these days, I knew they would be next on the schedule. Nevertheless, I wanted to share the efforts with my friends and let them do some of the research instead of doing it all by myself. They would absorb more, and I would work less. They might get some idea on how to approach the wines, and perhaps figure out which wine is which. With this in mind, we decided that we would be sociable and participate in the creation of this shared document. Here is how we did it:

Through using the “shared document” capability within Gmail, we were able to create a file that everyone on the team was able to edit and update. I chose fourteen wines, and asked for information on history, geography and flavors profiles, for each wine. I then asked them to research these wines, and update the shared document with whatever caught their interest. In about a month, the document received 492 revisions and updates.

The day of the tasting we all had a much better idea about these wines, even those we had never heard of before. We tasted the wines blind, and since I didn't want anybody to guess the wines by process of elimination, I picked only seven of the original fourteen. It was really hard to assess them this way but we had a lot of fun. Some of us even discovered new infatuations.

The final document is not a “polished” presentation, especially as it had many authors, however the information is very good, and as an initial experiment in Social Learning, it worked very well. If you are interested in our aromatic white wines document, here is the link: Aromatic White Wines