10/02/2010 by lizit.

I had a lengthy conversation yesterday with Amy Scatliff. We had been put in touch by another colleague who had met Amy at a conference last autumn. Amy and I are both interested in learning in other than classroom situations, which means we have a lot of common territory though arriving there via different routes.

During our discussion, we found ourselves discussing the way different types of learning are valued. Although the distinction in the value afforded to formal and informal learning can be traced back to the Greek philosophers (Hager, 1998) who regarded theoretical knowledge as having greater meaning and importance than knowledge derived from doing or creating, we did wonder if the non-accredited, and often unrecognised, learning of adults in the community has diminished in status in recent decades.  The emphasis on accredited qualifications is probably greater now than ever before the expectation that  pre-defined achievement levels will be met from early years education and throughout schooling and on into further and higher education. Amy commented on the way people often devalue their skills and are sometimes surprised - and even shocked - to find they have skills which others value and want to learn.

We also commented on the changing nature of society and societal values in both the US and UK over the past 30 years, with an increasing emphasis on financial rewards and the changing role of women in the economy. There is a sense that the type of skill sharing around a family gathering described by Foley (1999) is less likely now than in the past, but that one of the positive effects of the credit crunch might be a recognition of the need to reacquire some basic skills. We laughed about the current series on UK TV where people are being encouraged to share their grandmothers’ recipes and wondered whether this might signal the beginning of a change in the way different types of knowledge and skills are valued.

Reflecting on our conversation - and we covered much more territory than that outlined here - I am reminded of the law of unintended consequences: so often when we make a change (or when change occurs) although some problems may be alleviated or there may be positive growth in some ways, there is all too often a flip side which has not been anticipated. Sometimes it may be the silver lining of the dark cloud, but all too often the unintended consequences are negative rather than positive.

Foley, G. (1999). Learning in social action: A contribution to understanding informal education. London: Zed Books Ltd.
Hager, P. (1998). Recognition of Informal Learning: Challenges and Issues. Journal of Vocational Education and Training: The Vocational Aspect of Education, 50(4), 521-535.

Posted in informal learning, reflections | Print | 1 Comment »

06/01/2010 by lizit.

These notes are based on Jean Lave’s 1996 article “Teaching, as learning, in practice”.

It is an interesting article as it clearly identifies the focus of most learning research is not research on learning but “research on instruction, on depersonalised guidelines for the teaching of specific lesson-like things in school settings in order to improve learning.” Lave draws on her research of the apprenticeship practices of Liberian tailors and on Timothy Mitchell’s observations of the training of Egyptian lawyers, to come to the conclusion that learning rather than teaching is the core concept.

Starting with Scribner and Cole’s (1973) paper drawing a clear distinction between learning in formal settings and in informal settings, Lave shows that a polarity has developed which values formal schooling. This, combined with a psychological model of learning, has led to an increasing marginalisation of those who do not succeed in the school system. Putting this into the 21st century UK context it could be hypothesised that the emphasis on achieving government set targets in schools and the emphasis on increasing the number of young people entering higher education could have had the unintended consequence of reinforcing the development of an underclass amongst those young people who do not meet the targets, leading to the development of the gang culture and criminal behaviours which are increasingly in the public eye.

Lave is clear that learning is about far more than knowledge transfer. In both her examples, the apprentices, or learners, did not only learn a skill or set of concepts, but were enculterated in a multi-layered system of cultural values with their implications. Particularly in the case of the Liberian tailors, the apprenticeship and its completion was accompanied by a strong sense of worth and self-respect in stark contrast to the poverty of the society the tailors were part of.

Lave’s work led her to three changes in perspective from those espoused in traditional education models:

1. a reversal of the polarisation that school and institutional learning is positive and other forms of learning are negative
2. a focus on learners and learning rather than the transmitters of knowledge - teachers, care givers, etc
3. learning is not individual but is socially situated

In her work with Martin Packer, a tentative model to underpin learning theories was developed:

1. Telos or the idea that learning involves some kind of change or movement
2. Subject-world or the relationship between the individual or self and the social world
3. Learning mechanism which focuses on how learning happens

Lave concludes by saying: “The conditions for the transformation of persons are the same whether the telos of learning is movement towards growing up from babyhood, or adolescence, becoming a craftsperson or a philosopher, and/or becoming a marginal person in a world where participation in and thus learning divisions of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual preference, determine strongly who is consigned to the advantaged cores and disadvantaged margins of society.”

I found some the article resonated strongly with me. I have already given some thought to the marginalisation and dis-empowerment of parents of children and young people with autistic spectrum disorders and it may be that part of this stems from the fact that their knowledge of their children’s condition is situated rather than as a result of teaching. Empowerment implies a polarity as for somebody to be empowered somebody else has to be dis-empowered. In the current model, professionals hold the power (and the budgets). Would a recognition of parental learning and knowledge lead to empowerment, partnership and possibly more shared decision making?

Posted in ASD, empowerment, social learning, informal learning, community, education, learning | Print | 1 Comment »

24/12/2009 by lizit.

I’ve been struck by the number of articles I seem to be encountering which are discussing workplace learning as informal learning. Very few writers apart from possibly Billett (2002) seem to suggest learning at work can be seen as formal learning. Given the range of learning and training that is undertaken within the workplace this seems odd, and again suggests that the formal and informal labels are less than helpful. Seeing learning in the workplace as a mixture of intentional, incidental and serendipitous seems to make more sense (to me at least).

As an aside, I have been struggling a bit with how to differentiate incidental and serendipitous as I sense they are different. It seems to me that incidental learning is where something is learned while engaged in an activity, so undertaking a word processing task may include discovering how to change default font styles for a particular document. This is not intentional in the sense of being engaged in a learning task and it is not serendipitous in the sense of being stumbled across by chance, but it is a by-product of engagement in a task.

In thinking about workplace learning, I have been thinking about what is meant by workplace. Virtually everything I have read appears to envisage the workplace as a place of paid employment. I have not encountered any articles which recognise the home as the workplace - though this is self-evidently the case for some many parents and for others who are not in paid employment for whatever reason. For some reason, the workplace is seen as somewhere separate from the other environments people engage with during their daily lives.

Some of the work concerned with biography of learners appears to acknowledge the importance of other environments. For example, Hodkinson, et al, (2004) engage in a somewhat complex philosophical discussion about the relationship between the person and their social world, before identifying 4 principles (the comments in italics are mine):

• Workers/learners bring prior knowledge, understanding and skills with them, which can contribute to their future work and learning; (this reminded me of the illustration I often use in training contexts of having a ruc-sac of knowledge, skills and experience garnered from the totality of our life experience which we take with us from place to place and add to and adapt as we go)
• The habitus of workers, including their dispositions towards work, career and learning, influence the ways in which they construct and take advantage of opportunities for learning at work; (why just at work - surely the same applies in other environments people engage in)
• The values and dispositions of individual workers contribute to the co-production and reproduction of the communities of practice and/or organisational cultures and/or activity systems where they work; (again this could apply in other communities and environments people are part of)
• Working and belonging to a workplace community contributes to the developing habitus and sense of identity of the workers themselves. (ditto)

Although workplaces are easily identifiable environments from the perspective of study of learning, the observations drawn from workplace learning appear to be transferable in many circumstances to other environments where people learn, communities of interest being a fairly obvious example. One of the areas I need to consider as I read these various articles on workplace learning is the extent to which the findings are only relevant within the workplace or are equally relevant in other contexts where people learn. Given that people spend much of their time learning in one way or another, this could mean virtually any context.

On the surface at least, it appears that by favouring some forms of learning and some contexts above others, there is a danger that we fail to notice what different forms of learning have in common.

Billett, S. (2002). Critiquing workplace learning discourses: Participation and continuity at work. Studies in the Education of Adults, 34(1), 56-67.
Hodkinson, P., Hodkinson, H., Evans, K., Kersh, N., Fuller, A., Unwin, L., et al. (2004). The significance of individual biography in workplacelearning. Studies in the Education of Adults, 36(1), 6-24.

Posted in informal learning, concepts, community, bibliography, learning | Print | 1 Comment »

08/12/2009 by lizit.

Over the last couple of weeks or so, my thoughts about my DPhil research have taken some quite dramatic and unexpected turns but in a way which is making me feel rather excited and very grounded.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a planned meeting with my supervisor and a consultant from Social Sciences. The plan had been to look at methodology and data gathering for the studies I was planning of informal learning in Second Life. But in the time between arranging the meeting and it taking place, my thinking about informal learning had moved considerably as recorded in earlier blogs! We ended up talking about where I currently was, and recognising that I was talking about a very broad area, but one which could be examined in a narrow domain.  The advice accompanying that was that such a domain should ideally be one which I knew well.

It was one of those transforming moments when suddenly things which had not been coming together suddenly made sense. With no difficulty at all, Second Life and other virtual worlds were no longer part of the picture. Instead the very obvious domain which I know best was staring me in the face - people caring for children with an ASD. The whole range of learning styles is covered with the possibility of looking at learning journeys and the mix of learning types involved in a learning journey. Not only that, but I have access to so many potential study subjects - the parent support group I run, online groups, contact with schools and medical specialists…. Not only that but my supervisor has links and an interest in the area… The only question is why did it take so long to see the obvious!

So many of the themes that have been important through my professional life come together with this focus. My anger at the failure to recognise the skills and knowledge of people without appropriate qualifications. Questions about empowerment and change management, who are the experts. Ownership and change agency.  The creation of underclasses where people are stigmatised and disempowered …. Empowerment.

In the fortnight since that meeting, I have begun to think about what my research might involve, I have met another DPhil student who is looking at issues around stigmatisation, a colleague has given me links to references on expert patients, I am being given contacts with senior paediatricians, I have been given a contact with the person leading a major course on ASDs in Birmingham and had a useful formative discussion and the possibility of access to students on the course, I have met somebody working on the problems associated with labelling, I have come across the idea of using critical incident vignettes as a way of examining learning experiences, I have been encouraged to look again at Wenger’s work around boundaries …  I could go on and on, it seems so much has happened and come together in such a short time.

I’m very aware that I have a lot of work to do, not least scoping my studies, but I am feeling absurdly excited by the thought of doing work in an area I both understand and have a long term commitment to. I also know that I would not be where I am now if I had not spent the hours reading around lots of stuff and beginning to appreciate some of the complexity of things which on the surface seemed so simple and straightforward.

Posted in methodology, ASD, narratives, informal learning, community, research ideas, change agents | Print | 1 Comment »

21/11/2009 by lizit.

This will no doubt need more work, but is an attempt to capture something of the bigger picture and context against which thinking about adult learning is happening.

Posted in social learning, self-directed learning, informal learning, education, concepts, learning | Print | No Comments »

19/11/2009 by lizit.

Since my blog a couple of days ago where I mentioned the way Jane Hart was looking for a different way of categorising learning which moved away from the informal/formal model, Steven Verjans has set up a Cloudworks site which is providing an opportunity to explore Jane’s model further and to consider Harold Jarche’s extension to it.

As a result of reading the comments on the Cloudworks page, reading quite a bit about self-directed learning and how understanding of what it is has developed over the past thirty years, and playing more with my own idea, I have come up with this diagram.

It is very much a first stab at trying to create a model which provides scope for acknowledging the co-existence of both formal and informal and planned and serendipitous within each and every learning experience. This follows the observations of Colley, Hodkinson and Malcolm (2002, 2003) where they suggested there was little value in seeking to differentiate formal and informal learning as characteristics of each were found in both.

Obviously this is a work in progress, but it does begin to feel as though the time might be right to re-examine the informal/formal learning paradigm.

Posted in self-directed learning, social learning, informal learning, learning | Print | 1 Comment »

18/11/2009 by lizit.

Afraid the heading of this blog is a bit of a mouthful, but it comes out of my recent reading around self-directed learning and listening to a recording on Graham Attwell’s blog.  A phrase that jumped out of me from the recording was around how the ‘reflexivity and critique’ which is valued in formal learning can be incorporated into informal learning.  Over the last few days, I have been reading a lot around self-directed learning and one of the things that struck me about this was that in the first instance self-directed learning was something which was observed as happening - recognised in the early informal learning surveys - but then the education/social science community got hold of the concept and began to look at it in relation to formal education. Apart from the attempts to quantify self-directed learning, the emphasis appears to have been on the encouragement of independent learning in formal contexts (use of learning contracts and problem based learning) and questioning whether self-directed learning in the wild was really learning if it was focusing on skill development without the reflective elements.

Brookfield (1984) has a useful discussion about terminology - how the word ‘learning’ is understood and contrasting this with ‘education’ and ‘teaching’. Perhaps the ‘knowledge acquisition’ mentioned by Attwell should also form part of the semantic mix? Brookfield stresses the need for clarity in terminology: “one priority for thinkers in this field must be to propose clear and unambiguous definitions of learning and education in order that internal mental change is distinguished from the external collection, management and analysis of information.” Is it the continuing confusion over terminology underpinning the desire for the mental processes of informal learning to more closely resemble those of formal learning?

Is there a danger that informal learning will be undervalued in much the same way as informal care has been through the imposition of measures and standards that have little or nothing to do with the informal and all to do with something else, whatever label we give that something else?

Posted in informal learning, education, learning | Print | 2 Comments »

16/11/2009 by lizit.

For several months now I have been trying to get my head around informal learning. My starting point was one of endorsing the importance of informal learning. This was based largely on my community development experience, seeing the learning engaged in by people who had been considered educational failures, and more recently on recognising the amount of independent learning engaged in by all manner of individuals through the use of web resources. My involvement in various OU networks and the Sussex Learning Network has made me aware of the importance of Web 2.0 and social learning. I took part in the Clusters project which explored the potential use of a number of Web 2.0 tools in supporting students.

In exploring the informal learning literature, I have found a complex mishmash of debate about categorisation and definitions. The term has gained different meanings in different contexts and there are those who suggest it is an unhelpful term which should be avoided. As long ago as 2003, it was suggested that there is no clear differentiation between formal and informal learning but that both include elements of the other to varying degrees.

At the end of last week, in a flash of inspiration or madness, I suggested to my DPhil supervisor that perhaps a different typology was needed and suggested as a starting point 5 categories: other directed, self directed, incidental, serendipitous, and social. Over the weekend, I spent time doing literature searches on self-directed learning and found this was an area which had attracted a lot of attention and debate in the 1980s and early 1990s but the more recent literature seemed to be focusing on the development of independent learning skills in formal contexts rather than the earlier focus on self-teaching. I was not happy with my initial 5 categories; I find it particularly unhelpful using a term which has a clearly understood meaning in a different context. This morning, I was beginning to think about just 2 categories - self and other initiated - with sub-categories of intentional, incidental and accidental. I then came across a fascinating blog post from Jane Hart, signposted by Jay Cross. Although the focus is on use of social media in organisational training contexts, the starting point is an attempt to find a more satisfactory classification tool than formal and informal learning.

Posted in social learning, informal learning, research ideas, learning | Print | 1 Comment »

04/11/2009 by lizit.

Spotted a couple of interesting blogs this morning. Steve Wheeler from Plymouth was responding to a blog from Tillman Swinke in Atlantis. Swinke is discussing personal learning and contrasting formal and informal learning and the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in each.  He is basically saying that intrinsic motivation is more powerful than extrinsic and asking how the passion of intrinsically motivated informal learning can be incorporated into formal learning, suggesting social learning may be a way forward. (How I find myself wondering just what he means by social learning having seen the term used in so many different ways over the past months.)

Wheeler summarises Swinke’s blog and says that we begin to learn because we are interested - intrinsically motivated - but in formal education extrinsic motivation tends to take over as we seek to keep up with our peers, attain good enough grades, etc, and asks how interest and intrinsic interest can be/is maintained in formal learning. Wheeler then advocates PLEs as a way forward.

A commentator on Wheeler’s blog has pointed to the Futures of Education project which is asking questions about the redesign of education. This brings me back to another blog read this morning, Graham Attwell’s reflections on the use of computers in exams.

At root these posts are all raising some pretty fundamental questions about the nature of learning and education and the dichotomy between them.  Others educate me, but I learn. Some of what I learn is guided by my teachers who share their passion for an idea or a subject area. Some of what I am taught is the use of essential tools to facilitate my learning - the 3 ‘R’s. Much of what I learn now is out of interest and desire to learn and explore ideas and play with them either in my mind or with my hands. Some of what I have been taught in the past, I am rediscovering through my own learning in the present.

Good thoughts to start the day!

Posted in social learning, informal learning, education, motivation, blog | Print | 1 Comment »

03/11/2009 by lizit.

There is an interesting article in the Guardian on ELQ and the costs to students http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/03/second-degrees-higher-education-funding. Although my focus is more on incidental and serendipitous learning, it strikes me that the kind of sums of money involved in taking an additional qualification deemed to be at the same level as one already held is likely to result in a number - potentially large number - of people seeking to gain skills, training, expertise other than through formal education. It also makes me realise how fortunate I have been in the funding of my own education. Even if I have groused from time to time about having to pay my own postgraduate fees, at least they have been heavily subsidised. Whatever the government might be saying about wanting to increase the proportion of the population with degree level education, the possibility of increasing undergraduate fees and the excessive cost of retraining might well prove to have unintended consequences, especially for those who will not be entering the most highly paid of jobs.

Posted in informal learning, Government policy, funding, education | Print | No Comments »