eel-learning

Informal learning - a day of distinctions

On Friday I had a fascinating day at the eLearning Network's conference on Informal Learning or 'Learning despite the training department'.

Jane Hart (Waller-Hart) opened the day with a specially-recorded podcast from Jay Cross in California, who said the key question was ‘Are people learning fast enough to keep up with the business?’. Centralised, formal training on its own is too slow-moving and limited in scope to assure this: you have to put something in place to facilitiate informal, self-directed learning – not provide but faciliitate.

It was a day of distinctions. Every speaker had a definition of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ to put on the table, or other key distinctions which they thought would shed light on it. Some offered two-column tables of distinctions.  What emerged is that
a) there are no agreed, hard-and-fast definitions, any more than there ever were for things like blended learning, learning management systems or elearning itself
b) everyone kind-of knows what they mean. It’s only on the borders that there’s an issue
c) the principal issue is – if the Learning  & Development function is providing or backing informal learning, is it still informal or does that make it a different kind of formal learning?

Distinctions:
Managed  vs   self-managed
On the record  vs  off-the-record
Predetermined solutions vs self-generated solutions
‘Follower’ learners  vs ‘leader’ learners

The blend leading the blend

...sorry, I couldn't resist!

As trainers in my organisation learn to say 'blended learning' and the learning management system we've bought offers the chance to embed it, I attended a discussion last year where a team had gone to investigate eLearning in the US, and came back saying 'blended learning' is a non-term - people in training there don't use it at all, because it's taken for granted, it's just what you do.

What I've seen is the effort to reduce the length of face to face courses, mainly for logistical or cost reasons, replacing some of the content-giving by eLearning, or at least by reading material offered online. Where the material is lengthy, cost restraints have prevented us from offering bound, printed versions - which would be more usable for the majority - leading to either a long sequence of screens of long text, or people printing same locally. That's in some cases, in other cases they've addressed it properly and made pre-course work more usable and appropriate. But that's as far as the definition of blending has gone.

In this dialogue on Tony's site, Tony Karrer and David Wilson debate and investigate what is really needed in blended learning and whether it's a matter of profound change in company's way of doing things. It's also an object lesson in how Web 2.0 (in this case blog and comment) gives you more than just reading an article.