There is quite a buzz around the idea of Informal Learning at the moment. This is due in large part to the continuing rise of technologies that allow learners to form their own connections with other learners, search, browse and form their own personal learning places filled with information that they find interesting and useful.
This may lead to useful learning.
This sentence is the key.
Self-directed searching, browsing and accumulation may lead to learning - but it may not. Whether it leads to learning or not depends on:
- how the person processes all the new information they are finding
- what their existing knowledge base is
- whether they understand what they are reading/viewing
- whether they overload themselves with too much information at one sitting
Will the learning be useful? This depends upon whose perspective you are assessing this. Personal usefulness and business usefulness.
Usefulness depends on where you coming from, your perspective. You'd imagine that in work environments usefulness would relate more to measurable work outcomes. Usefulness from a personal perspective is more subjective and hard to measure.
But, back to the title of this post. Informal Learning is not new. Planting of crops was not taught through formal means over the last few thousand years, the wheel was not invented because of insights gained through a formal diploma, and so on. Most learning has historically been informal. People learnt from their family and others with whom they had direct contact. Storytelling was used to pass down knowledge from generation to generation. Trial and error. Luck. Disaster.
New insights, innovations, arose when someone combined two or more pieces of existing knowledge and created something new.
Over time however learning was formalised, it made sense. Schools,universities and colleges were able to share knowledge and direct learning. As a society people learnt more and faster than ever before. But are times changing once more?
The internet made information freely available, Google made it easy to search for information, now social networks allow people to create their own 'villages' of learning. I use the term 'villages' because in many ways social networking is building virtual villages. It allows learners to learn in the same way that people did through storytelling in tribes, 'common knowledge' takes on a renewed meaning.
Once the debate between learning philosophies looked like this (virtually the same as the earlier image). Either/or with a little shared space.
To recreate the formal vs informal learning debate along these lines however gets us nowhere really. Humanistic vs vocational learning/Informal vs formal learning. I don't believe that it matters, and indeed most probably looks more like this:
The best learning happens through both informal learning and formal learning. The aim in all cases is to find ways to improve the effectiveness of both. To focus solely on one over the other reduces outcomes, this is the new 'blended learning'.
