Pour Thierry de Baillon, je cite «  il est de plus en plus illusoire de vouloir considérer le savoir comme étant soit informel, soit formel. Tout morceau de savoir est paradoxalement à la fois formel et informel ».

J’abonde dans son sens… il me semble qu’il y a là la  dénonciation d’un formatage historique qui consiste a vouloir dissocier systématiquement dans nos processus d’apprentissage l’approche formelle, cognitiviste, réflexive  de l’approche informelle, émergente, sociale.  D’un point de vue didactique, notre cursus éducatif vise précisément a séparer les deux approches  sous couvert d’efficacité.

Or il me semble que les Technologies de l’information et de la communication viennent bousculer radicalement l’ensemble de ces repères pédagogiques : au travers de leurs usages, elles nous font redécouvrir une évidence : nous jouons naturellement sur la complémentarité des niveaux formels et informels, et cela,  a la fois sur le plan individuel et sur le plan collectif !

Les réseaux apprenants comme Apprendre 2.0 illustrent d’ailleurs assez bien la fertilité de cette double hybridation formative !

Can we use these classifications to draw up some guidelines to help us explain formal and informal learning as it pertains to the workplace? Are there ways of "formalizing" some or all of this without losing out on the personal relationships we have with our friends and colleagues, those who we turn to help us solve a problem. Can we formalize the informal?

This article was originally published in fastcompagny.com

To benefit from social learning, build a culture that makes learning fun, productive and commonplace, a culture where learning is part of everyday work. Marcia Conner and Steve LeBlanc look at where social learning thrives.

Social learning is not just the technology of social media, although it makes use of it. It is not merely the ability to express yourself in a group of opt-in friends. Social learning combines social media tools with a shift in the corporate culture, a shift that encourages ongoing knowledge transfer and connects people in ways that make learning a joy.

Social learning thrives in a culture of service and wonder. It is inspired by leaders, enabled by technology and ignited by opportunities that have only recently unfolded.

If a culture is focused on service, the most pressing question is, "How can I help you?" How can I help you succeed? How can I help you ask strong questions, take wise risks and deliver great content? How can I help you prosper? Most importantly, how can I help you learn and make new connections? How can I help you serve the larger group, of which we are both a part?

Yet in most classrooms, young people are prevented from helping each other learn and succeed. In some communities, concern for property values and yard maintenance outweigh assisting neighbors. In many companies, talk of competitors and departmental politics overshadow someone's need for mentoring or gaining fresh perspective. Over 60 years ago, W. Edwards Demming encouraged management to drive out fear and break down barriers between departments, and still worry and walls are the two constants that most organizations share.

Part of why we are not better at helping one another learn and grow is that our attention is spread thin. There is so much going on. We haven't built this notion of serving into the business cycle; into our daily work. Nor have we dismantled the myth that fear and embarrassment somehow motivates people to learn. By choosing wisely where we place our attention, we have more attention and enthusiasm to give. Or as Clay Shirky put it at Web 2.0 Expo NY, "It's not information overload. It's filter failure."

Social learning is accelerated when we give our attention to individuals, groups and projects that interest and energize us. We self-select the themes we want to follow and filter out those that feel burdensome, all with impunity. No one gets offended when we don't follow a project outside our domain. No one notices when we temporarily filter out the rants of people beating their own drum.

It's the technology of social learning, and social media in general, that allows us to regulate our attention to those areas where we can gain the highest return on investment, and put our best contributions out into the world. It's the culture of social learning that helps identify how those contributions are important to us all.

Requests for help, feedback and insight can be made without burden, without coercion, without fear. It takes time, though. You don't simply announce a culture of service one day in the hope that everyone will figure it out.

Growing a culture of service is more like planting a garden than building a shed. A garden requires tending, whereas a shed is built once. A social learning culture requires design, training, guidance, leadership, monitoring and celebrating successes, large and small. People need to know where the organization is headed and why it matters. It's not easy for people to make the shift from a culture where they fear they are not good enough and need to improve, to one where they feel safe enough to want to improve for the enjoyment of it. Some will think it impossible for a whole culture to shift from fear-based fixes to joy-based learning, from coercion to inspiration. Others have witnessed it and will cheer along.

The trail is being blazed by some unexpected players, including IBM Lotus and the CIA. We do not know all of what it takes to make this cultural shift work. There is still a kind of magic in the soup. But from our own work and the illustrative examples from groups like the 2.0 Adoption Council, we are seeing stunning examples of where it works. When done well, the results are nothing short of magical.

Think of asking someone out. A trip to Spain is a larger request than a local dinner, which is larger than meeting for coffee. The larger the request, the more pressure and the more difficult it is to back out. The smaller your request, the more fun you make it to participate. Whether courting customers, friends or romance, demonstrate your interest by listening and connecting. Help them succeed.

The easier the tools make it for people to tell us what they need, the easier and more enjoyable it is to be genuinely helpful. The technology and culture of social learning can create an environment where you are enthusiastically supported, where your sense of wonder returns and creativity blossoms — where people thrive.

Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia), vice president of enterprise for Pistachio Consulting works at the intersection of social messaging and learning culture. She writes the "Learn at All Levels" column for Fast Company. Her new book, The New Social Learning, will be out in May.

Steve LeBlanc (@sleveo), public speaker, corporate trainer and holistic healer sees opportunities everywhere for learning and helping people connect.

When Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan return from patrol, they spend time relaxing together in small, tightly-knit groups and tell stories about the mission. There is no form to these sessions, just soldiers hanging out with each other. The conversations include jokes and insults, but the act of sharing helps to make the group more cohesive. Military leaders see this time as essential, and no one interferes with these small groups.

This is an excellent example of the importance of informal learning. It’s a fact that every soldier had been formally trained before arriving in Afghanistan. However, the unit cannot be effective unless all individuals work together. Informal learning is the glue that keeps groups together during tough times. The actual "Return on Investment" of these storytelling sessions cannot be determined as a percentage of effectiveness, but their value is obvious.

Doing our best is a normal human desire and most organizations want people to work their best. Klaus Wittkuhn, a performance improvement practitioner, wrote in Performance Improvement magazine (2004), "It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design the system properly to make sure that the performers can leverage all their capabilities."

A key difference between formal training and informal learning is that the former is designed (push) while the latter is enabled (pull). As far as formal training goes, we have several models and many examples of good practices. But training alone is not enough. The best training programs can only address a maximum of 20% of the work performance issues in an organization. Training can only help to develop skills and knowledge if we know in advance what these are. In many cases, we don't know what our future performance needs will be.

My interest in informal learning has grown with my experiences online. We now have a wide array of cheap and plentiful platforms for informal learning - blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, podcasts, social networks, micro-blogs. Digital networks mean that we are no longer limited to reading what has been formally published or talking only to our limited social circle. We can now engage in much larger conversations, as an individual, a member of a group, or within an organization. Ignoring, or blocking, ways to learn informally online would be like handicapping every employee's cognitive abilities.

Supporting informal learning is similar to raising a child. You cannot train for all possible circumstances in life, but you can be a good example, accept failure, encourage learning  and provide a caring environment. Let’s take a similar, but much less dangerous situation, than that of the soldiers in Afghanistan. Imagine 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 company 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.

An enterprise may not be able to devote official down time for informal learning, but it can ease the way for other kinds of communication that support 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 informal communication; just as a dozen soldiers in a tent are going to tell stories, bond and learn.

We have growing evidence that blogs, wikis, online fora, or knowledge-sharing are effective in increasing organizational performance. The military storytelling example clearly shows why unstructured, informal learning is so important to the unit’s effectiveness, even though every soldier is already highly trained. Not all learning has to be directed and in many cases we learn more with less outside direction.

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Formaliser l'informel

To encourage debate and exchange on Social Learning and Networked Enterprise , ECOLLAB is a monthly event in the form of a blog carnival, which will bring together all persons interested by these subjects.

For its second edition, Ecollab will discuss Informal Learning. Can we formalize it? Can we Should we? How much? How?

This topic inspires you? Feel free to participate (see the conditions for participation. This blog carnival has no deadline. There will always be open to your post. Just let us know when your contribution will be ready.

This is our own response, originally written by Harold Jarche and Jane Hart :

If informal learning is so important then perhaps we should not leave it to chance. But if we formalize the processes then we may destroy the benefits of informal learning.

First of all, let's clear up some terms. Learning is something that happens inside a person and cannot be "done" to someone. What we do to support, encourage or direct learning can be in the form of training - to do something that is measurable and observable, such as driving a car, requiring practice and feedback to master. It can also be under the umbrella of education - being exposed to ideas and concepts to encourage learning. Some may call this schooling, such as the definition of "formal education" by Merriam, Caffarella & Baumgartner (2007)

"highly institutionalized, bureaucratic, curriculum driven, and formally recognized with grades, diplomas, or certificates" (p.29). [Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide (3rd ed.) New York: Wiley.

Training, education and schooling are not learning. This makes the question in title a bit problematic. A better question is whether we should formalize all practices in the workplace that encourage learning. So far we have formalized skill and knowledge acquisition through training. However, there is still much training that is conducted that doesn't address those two issues, even though that is all that training can ever hope to achieve. From the book Informal Learning, by Jay Cross:

The leading human performance authorities “have all demonstrated that most performance deficiencies in the workplace are not a result of skill and knowledge gaps. Far more frequently, they are due to environmental factors, such as lack of clear expectations; insufficient and untimely feedback; lack of access to required information; inadequate tools, resources and procedures; inappropriate and even counterproductive incentives; task interference and administrative obstacles that prevent achieving desired results” (Stolovitch & Keeps, 2002, p. 1).

At New Seasons [food market chain], you won’t see new hires crammed into three days of New Employee Training that’s so common today. After their Day One Orientation, New Seasons newbies are pretty much set free in their departments. “New Seasons’ training is like a Waldorf School experience. There’s no codified way for people to learn most jobs. People are told to look around, figure it out and ask for help when they need it,” said Charla [HR Director].

One of the reasons that informal learning has become a hot topic for workplace performance is that we now have an incredible array of communication tools, especially web social media. These enable knowledge-sharing on an unprecedented scale and we are just beginning to understand how to use them for personal and organizational learning, the latter of incredible importance for business performance. Social media enable us to get work done in a knowledge economy.

Jane Hart says that

Rather than use the broad categories of formal and informal learning - terms which I think are  pretty difficult to grasp, and which are being confused and abused if phrases I have read like "managing informal learning information" are anything to go by! - I have decided to categorise the use of social media in the following 5 different ways":
1.    Intra-Organisational Learning – how social media tools can be used to keep employees up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives
2.    Formal Structured Learning - how educators (teachers, trainers, learning designers) as well as students can use social media within education and training – for courses, classes, workshops etc
3.    Group Directed Learning – how groups of individuals - teams, projects, study groups etc – can use social media to work and learn together (a “group” could just be two people, so coaching and mentoring falls into this category)
4.    Personal Directed Learning – how individuals can use social media for their own (self-directed) personal or professional learning
5.    Accidental & Serendipitous Learning – how individuals, by using social media, can learn without consciously realising it (aka incidental or random learning)

So here is the question:

Can we use these classifications to draw up some guidelines to help us explain formal and informal learning as it pertains to the workplace? Are there ways of "formalizing" some or all of this without losing out on the personal relationships we have with our friends and colleagues, those who we turn to help us solve a problem. Can we formalize the informal?