Beyond formal learning: Informal community eLearning (original) (raw)
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Learning in Informal Online Networks and Communities
2010
In 2008, as part of its policy support for DG Education and Culture, IPTS launched a study to explore the innovative social and pedagogical approaches to learning that are emerging in new ICT-enabled collaborative settings. This is the final report on the project. Lifelong learning plays a crucial role in society today as jobs, and the skills they require, are changing. Recent technological and social developments in online settings have the potential to support lifelong learning in new ways. Online collaborative spaces can support both intentional and non-intentional learning in new ways through various forms of participation. These online platforms, networks and communities support learning all the key competences for lifelong learning, including new transversal skills and personal growth in a social context. However, ensuring digital fluency and self-regulated learning skills for all becomes a crucial challenge and enabler for lifelong learning. Furthermore, individuals need to be prepared for and interested in learning. Communities can encourage their members to participate and learn with a sociable, openly-managed and developing culture. The report argues that online networks and communities can contribute to all the major European Education and Training policy objectives, i.e. modernising educational institutions to support the lifelong learning continuum with new opportunities for equity, quality and efficiency, and learning key competences and transversal skills. However, a new learner-centred approach for lifelong learning by learners, education providers and employers is needed. All education stakeholders should engage in developing lifelong learning opportunities through collaboration and new partnerships.
Understanding how learning communities are formed and evaluating their efficacy in supporting learning have a bearing on the facilitation of successful online learning experiences. This paper elaborates on the value of adopting a multiple planes of development (Rogoff, 1995) analytical framework to investigate the development and conduct of an online learning community. The analysis is grounded in a case study of a semester long fully online asynchronous graduate course in a New Zealand tertiary institution. Evidence is advanced that while development and change along the personal, interpersonal and community planes of development can be understood as distinct, each plane influences and mediates the other two planes. Such a framework allows for a comprehensive understanding of the active processes involved in shaping a community’s individual and collective knowledge growth. It is a useful tool for responding to the complexity and 'messiness' of real life socialcultural conte...
Exploring the Role of Informal Learning in Real-Life Learning
IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, 2005
When we refer to real-life learning we can readily image learning taking place in our everyday lives, at work, rest and play, with and without information and communications technology (ICT). The new competencies of young and old peoples to create their own learning communities, using ICT, is one that can provide powerful informal learning situations. The paper will ask questions about the impact of informal learning on attitudes to learning; about the demands placed upon real-life learning provided in professional and vocational education; and upon the role of ICT in building capacity for communities and economies.
Review of Learning in ICT-enabled Networks and Communities
2009
This report is part of a project launched by IPTS with DG Education and Culture to study the innovations for learning, which are emerging in the new collaborative and informal settings enabled by ICT. The report gathers and analyses evidence from learning opportunities that are emerging in ICT-enabled networks and communities. In these new virtual spaces, participation is motivated by an interest to a topic, by creative production and by search for social connection. Online networks and communities emerge both within and across organisations as well as in a completely open and bottom-up manner. Accessing, following, and contributing to the communities can lead to a range of learning outcomes. New technologies afford tools and means for people to participate in communities in a personally meaningful way. However, not all individuals are necessarily equipped with skills or knowledge to benefit from these opportunities for their lifelong learning. Major challenges relate both to the initial barriers for accessing online communities with confident and critical digital competence and skills for self-regulated learning. Finding ways to identify, assess and certify relevant learning and new skills that can be obtained and practised in these environments is a major task. The report argues that educational institutions should find ways to connect with and learn from these new learning approaches and settings in order to bring about their own transformation for the 21st century, and to support competence building for new jobs and personal development with a learner-centred and lifelong perspective.
Who Do We Learn from at Work? Interlinked Communities of Practice and Informal Learning
2002
This paper addresses the question of who is involved in learning in workplaces. It draws on a study of multiple worksites with differentiated work within a large educational organization. It discusses the value of communities of learning in conceptualizing the question and suggests that additional factors such as social networks, structural relationships and the context of particular work need to be considered. Introduction Learning at work constitutes a large part of the learning undertaken by adults during their lives. This paper investigates a fundamental aspect of this: who do we learn from at work? This is important because firstly, there have been suggestions that formal systematic learning is of much lesser importance than informal learning and, secondly, it has been argued that the person who is expected by organizations to foster learning in the workplace—the workplace supervisor—is unable to do so effectively because of other features of their role (Hughes, in press). The ...
Learning Communities-Reality or Feelgood Factor?
Education in a …, 2003
Community, always a somewhat elusive concept, is being re-interpreted in the Internet context, where online or virtual communities proliferate numerically, albeit of very variable activity and quality. Normative views of online communities are contrasted with the empirical approach advocated in this paper. Social theories of learning are introduced in the context of online learning communities. A categorisation of definitions of online communities is explored to inform the use of Steinmueller's framework for virtual communities in understanding online learning communities and networked learning. The relevance of the popular concept of Communities of Practice to networked learning in education is discussed, and two possible types of CoPs are outlined. Steinmueller's framework is proposed to inform much-needed empirical research into e-learning communities and other forms of networked learning in education.
Constructing learning spaces: What we can learn from studies of informal learning online
A report from the market research firm Ambient Insight indicated that by 2015, 25 million post-secondary students in the United States could be enrolled in an online course (Adkins, 2011). As a consequence, they argued, we will see a decline in student enrollment in physical classrooms. In fact, the report estimated a five-year decline of 22 percent (from 14.4 million in 2010 to 4.1 million in 2015) in students attending traditional classrooms. Yet, in the face of these projections and despite innovation in educational technologies, there remains a consistent number of academics who are concerned that the quality of online instruction is not equal to face-to-face (f2f) encounters (Allen & Seaman, 2011). It is this question—a question of learning and how to facilitate high quality experiences—that we take up in this article. This question forces us to consider simultaneously: 1) what are the conditions that are necessary for learning to occur in online spaces, and 2) what are the best practices associated with effective learning these environments? To these ends, we focus on the characteristics of digital informal learning environments and on how these environments are constructed rhetorically and primarily discursively via deliberate facilitation strategies focused on encouraging learning.
Exploring the development of learning communities in online settings
2002
Abstract This paper discusses the notion of community as an outcome of working within an online environment. In particular, the paper explores the concept of users' development of a sense of community as an outcome of working within an online environment designed to support the professional and personal development of its users.
Informal learning communities in the knowledge economy
TelE-learning: the challenge for the third …, 2002
Our research in the multimedia sector is centred on the concept of collective competencies and the way people work and learn. Our findings reflect the changing contours of learning in many knowledge-based sectors. The modes of learning are changing partly because the modes of work and the types of careers in this sector also present new characteristics, and it is this aspect that we explore here: the new modes of collective work or teamwork, and the way people learn in this context.