Informal Learning

In re-reading Dave Pollard’s post on personal knowledge management (PKM) I noticed some parallels with the field of online learning. Dave states that:

And although technology companies, by coopting the term Knowledge Management and making it synonymous with centralized content management, have played a role in tarnishing KM’s image, some technology companies are now developing simple, intuitive tools that will make each of the four components of PKM easier to implement.

I think that technology firms did the same with e-learning. They coopted the term to mean structured and managed courses online.

Dave’s experience showed that people were more interested in their own knowledge than in the organisation’s knowledge.

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [Personal Productivity Improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories.

E-learning, for many, has come to mean courses online, delivered via learning management systems. One problem with this model is that learners (the key participants) don’t care about how learning is managed. Another problem is that the course and class models don’t work very well online.

I think that face-to-face classes have worked fairly well historically because good teachers and students could always make up for the inherently poor design. Looks could be passed between students, conversations could take place between class, and trusting relationships could develop over time together in the classroom. However, in an online environment the design flaws stand out, because people can’t easily communicate outside the course-in-a-box.

As the horseless carriage was the outdated metaphor for the automobile, so the course is the outdated metaphor for learning online.

The Internet is the most powerful communication environment that humans have ever built. The Internet is about communication, not content. Therefore, learning online needs to focus on communicating and connecting. If it doesn’t, it will be irrelevant to those who actually live and work online.

Small pieces, loosely joined in an informal and unstructured way, is a better model for online learning. It leverages the inherent nature of the medium. Virtual classrooms and online courses constrain communication and learner control. We need to build better models and methods to create personally meaningful online learning. Using the lens of informal learning is a start.

Via Luis Suarez is this story on CNEWS [dead link: see comment below] about a cultural anthropologist, Anne Irwin, who has been studying soldiers in the field and how they learn and bond through storytelling. The soldiers of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry battle group are in Afghanistan and Prof. Irwin is there to watch and understand:

When they are out in the field and return from a patrol, the exhausted soldiers relax together in small, tightly-knit groups – Irwin calls them “nesting circles” – and recount the events of the day or the mission.

Each soldier contributes a story, an anecdote or even a joke, adding stock and spice into what becomes a collective stew of experiences, she said. They also playfully insult each other.

The storytelling not only helps forge the individual identity of each soldier, it builds interpersonal relationships that can have a bearing on how well the unit performs on the battlefield.

Having served in the same regiment and having been active in training and learning for many years now, I can say that this is the perfect example of the importance of informal learning. It’s a fact that these soldiers have all been formally trained in the skills of the infantry. However, the unit is not an effective fighting force until individuals have worked together. Informal learning is the glue that helps keep them together during the tough times. Support for these “nesting circles” and other ways to facilitate group learning is essential.

Let’s take a similar, but much less dangerous situation. Imagine a company that has a project team that has had a difficult client with tight deadlines and then managed to pull it off. Immediately after the last deliverable, the team is redistributed across the organisation to get to the next project, because “time is money”. There has been no time to talk or to swap stories or to find out what Bob was doing while Mary was dealing with a certain crisis. There are no “nesting circles” here to develop the group’s learning.

Civilian organisations might not be able to devote down time to informal learning, but they can ease the way for other kinds of communication that may help informal learning. Storytelling through blogs is possible for those who want to write. Sharing pictures on the Intranet can evoke memories and encourage people to revisit an event and learn from it. The key is to create environments that support these types of communication and learning — just as a dozen soldiers in a tent are going to tell stories, bond, and learn.

Stephen Downes is blogging the Canadian Council on Learning’s Conference on Adult Learning in Canada. Stephen’s report on the presentation (see my last post) on e-learning shows, among other findings, the significance of informal learning:

Griff Richards: on four functional areas:
– e-learning as an extension of military education
– e-learning as distance education
– e-learning as classroom education
– e-learning as informal education

Terry Anderson: report misses an emphasis on informal learning.

The notion of the message being more impotant than the carrier: I asked some students, is it worth the extra money? Some said it was, and the logic was, a power issue. They had the same resources the professor did. And because they could take time to research something, they would go into the class knowing more that what the prof does. It completely changes the playing field. And when I look at online informal learning, I see, they’re offering advice, practical advice, that they cannot get. And again, it’s about power. So the question is, is it just the thing we used to do? Has this been developed and explored?

Comment: Following up on Melissa’s comment: I think perhaps we need a response that takes it out of the formal education sector. When we respond from the formal sector, we are still looking at teaching and not learning. And perhaps adult learners who might have an affinity for technology might have an interest in knowledge and sharing, not so much credits. Not teaching, but the informal use of learning for new knowledge.

Comment: paper on barriers. 59 percent of people are participating in informal learning. Do you really know who those users are who are using e-learning?

We’re currently in our second Informl Learning Unworkshop, using various web tools that didn’t exist several years ago, with participants around the globe.

My initial experiences in the learning field were from the point of view of methods of instruction (how to get subject matter across to captive students) and later, the systems approach to training (from which flows instructional systems design or ISD). Later I became immersed in human performance technology, and found it a good method to analyse certain aspects of organisational performance. HPT ensures that training, which is costly, isn’t prescribed unless it addresses a verifiable lack of skills and/or knowledge. Even HPT itself seems to be too constrained for me now.

What I like about informal learning is that it opens up the way to look at other methods of helping people to learn. Training and education are two sets of tools but there are many more. Options for learning have increased exponentially with access to the Internet. As with any new technology, we first put the old media (modules, courses, classrooms, programs, degrees) into the new medium. Now that some of us are becoming more comfortable with the medium, we are seeing more experimentation.

Using blogs, wikis, podcasts or social bookmarks for learning can change the dynamic from teaching-centric to learning-centric. Informal learning is not new, but the ways in which we can connect with others have improved drastically (skype, anyone?). Informal learning is about connecting – whether it be to information or people.

The network effect of the Web is explained in detail in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Benkler describes the changes that a networked society can have on our governance, economic and cultural structures [more to follow on this book as I savour every page]:

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.

Learning skills, especially outside the formal training & education sphere, are necessary for everyone in our society to take advantage of the opportunities of a networked information economy. I believe that the development of environments that nurture informal, networked learning will be the ISD of the 21st century.