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?

In my last post, I asked some questions about formalising informal learning. And answered them.
If:

Then you'll be fine.

Four steps to formalising informal learning without messing it up and making everybody think you're a control freak. . .

1. Kill some sacred cows.
I'm thinking particularly about the tyranny of Kirkpatrick, SMART targets, Learning Objectives and numerical ROI metrics.

Seriously, what is it with teachers, trainers and Learning Objectives? (Note: I said 'tyranny'. I'm not saying these things never have value - like Learning Styles, NLP, Multiple Intelligences, Myers-Briggs and all that bunk intuitive stuff, they're especially useful as a starting point, as a social object and a foundation for collaborative work.

2. Pave the cowpaths. Like Walt Disney.

Los Angeles IxDA - Designing Social Interfaces

I read the expression 'pave the cowpath' the other day in a presentation from Erin Malone on Designing Social Interfaces. It's similar to the idea of Desire Paths and the opposite of 'build it and they will come' Potemkin Village (cf Creepy Treehouse).  Don't set things up and expect learners to jump in and play with your toys. Watch what people do and help them do it more easily. Here's an example from Walt Disney:

Shortly after Disney World opened in Florida, Walt Disney called a meeting of all senior personnel to get an idea of how the opening of the park was going.  All members gave their report, some good news, some bad news, including many challenges that had been anticipated during the planning of the park but could not be affirmed until the park was in full operation.  The conversation then moved to maintenance and operations.  The senior official in charge was very upset because the public was not always walking on the paved sidewalks, sometimes they would cut across his manicured lawns in an attempt to get to a certain location quicker.  After a while and many people taking the same shortcut, a unsightly brown swatch formed like a scar across the deep green, finely cut grass.  This particular official asked if chains, fences or signs asking visitors to stay on the designated paths could be erected.  Disney response was simple, but brilliant:

“No.  They’re telling you where to put the paths.”

Time for an interesting and true intermission about Desire Paths
This little intermission is longer than I'd like but it illustrates Desire Paths on the web perfectly.

I'm pretty keen on Desire Paths and the story above is one I've shared many times. I first heard about them on the Fritinancy blog back in 2006.  It was the pre-read/write-web-as-prosthetic-memory days and I promptly forgot where I found it.

Flash forward three years and I have a conversation with somebody on Twitter about something similar to Desire Paths - and the Walt Disney anecdote.This prompted me to do some refinding. It took 20 minutes or so, but I found some links through a circuitous route (I couldn't even remember the name 'desire path' and had to dig back through kottke.org posts). Anyway, I found stuff and shared it with my Twitter friend.

Today, I had a similar problem. I knew the name 'Desire Paths' but I also knew that Nancy Friedman's Fritinancy post didn't have the Walt Disney anecdote. Deja vu.

So, I type "desire path" "walt disney" into Google and the above link comes up - it's the same guy from Twitter who blogged it name-checking me as one of the sources for the post. That, people, is a Desire Path and how informal learning works when it works well.

3. Stop reading so many Learning & Development blogs and start reading the Knowledge Management people.
I felt like a bit of a fraud writing the previous post. For all of our banging on about how to formalise informal learning, the #KM people have been doing it for twenty years (not necessarily terribly well, but they've learned a lot).

I've promised too many people that I'd do a best of #KM blogs round up. So, I'll get on to that and back up what I'm saying here in the next couple of weeks.

But for now, I'd recommend you read The Social Life of Information as a starting point.
 
4. Look at this

1. Don't get hung up on getting things exactly right
Communities of Practice are a classic example of something we thought was best run 'informally'. Turns out we were only partly right. Informal is as slippery a word as formal is. Informal != unorganised or even Theory Y-style laissez-faire. Training's not dead yet.

2. Don't give in to your political instincts
I think it's essential for modern organisations to embrace informal learning given some of the startling changes (I know it's a cliche but it's true) taking place now. But I find it suspicious that the world is doing exactly what I want it to... Incidentally, this goes for the informal learning is rubbish' people too.

3. Don't forget that participation bandwidth is probably just as important as Cognitive Load Theory.

4. Don't forget that the key difference between informal learning and formal learning is the permeable classroom walls. Informal learning will be eclectic and even promiscuous in where it borrows from, by definition.
You didn't think I'd go a whole two posts without mentioning games, did you?  The ludologists are having some great ideas. This idea - nothing to do with informal learning - of how to think about Learning Objectives as atoms in a skill chain is really interesting, for example. Games and informal learning programmes are all about creating problem-solving spaces.
Social Gaming developers have discovered that the formal elements of design are much less important in social games. The complicated stuff is handled client-side so there's less need for a rigorously formal approach. 

Simon Bostock (@BFchirpy) works where learning meets games meets work meets knowledge meets play meets networks. And looks forward to the day when he'll stop having to explain what that actually means.

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• devote their love and attention to the community and the infrastructure for informal learning
• spend cash on facilities and outside coaching
• steer well-clear of content and curricula
• tread carefully around preaching mission ie 'calling'

I appear to have mixed feelings about 'certification' ie motivation. Pay attention and tread carefully? I'm not sure how that works - what do you think?

Next post: How does this!! Translate into actions?

Simon Bostock (@BFchirpy) works where learning meets games meets work meets knowledge meets play meets networks. And looks forward to the day when he'll stop having to explain what that actually means.

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Version française ici.

Much has been told and written about the capital importance of knowledge in organizations, and the rise of networks-enabled enterprise emphasizes even more the role of informal learning and knowledge sharing in human interactions in the workplace.  Enterprise 2.0 is neither about technology nor about people, Enterprise 2.0 is about capturing and harnessing the knowledge flows which circulate inside and across organizations. But “capturing” knowledge is somehow like seizing the air we breathe. I f knowledge were an animal, it would definitely be a cat. Both Cheshire and Schrödinger’s cats.

Knowledge as Cheshire cat

As innocuous as the word seems, defining ‘knowledge’, particularly in relation to ‘information’, is no easy task. Furthermore, English language only has one word where French, for example, has two: “savoir” and “connaissance”.  “Savoir” encompasses every human symbolic production (whether it be concepts, data, methods, philosophies…) and is independent from any being. “Connaissance”, on the other side, relates to the appropriation of knowledge by the human being. It is a never-ending process of understanding in the spiritual sense of it (see for instance, in French, these articles from Florence Meichel or René Barbier). Most of modern definitions of knowledge assume its social nature, embedding value into context.

The same piece of information won’t have the same meaning and importance if delivered or learned in different contexts. The way we learn this information is by itself part of its contextual inheritance, making look knowledge like the Cheshire’s cat: whenever you think you are able to formalize it, it has already taken a different meaning in another context, leaving you with dead, barely usable, information. Every Knowledge Manager knows how difficult reusability of formalized knowledge is.

An idealistic vision of a network-based company would allow for free flow of knowledge without any formalization. Nevertheless, the need for formalizing informal learning, as way of capturing informal knowledge, is quite mandatory in our organizations, notably in regard to HR issues. As Jon Husband recently pointed out:

Organizational structures, job requirements and training valuation require a way to measure informal learning, thus to somehow formalize it. Rather than chasing the utopian goal to formalize knowledge, companies are in fact able to formalize and measure its outcome (think about Cheshire cat’s smile): increased ability to solve problems, coaching or mentoring assignments,…

Knowledge as Schrödinger’s cat

Furthermore, thinking of knowledge as a dual, formal versus informal, statement is a mere illusion. Any discrete piece of knowledge is paradoxically at the same time both a formal and informal artifact and, like in the Schrödinger’s cat paradox, we cannot assert anything before we actually use it. Every parent knows that acquisition of the most ever formalized knowledge by children is in fact conditioned by the relationship they maintain with their teachers.

Web 2.0 technologies allow us to formalize the informal, allowing us to tag, comment, recommend documents or contributions, adding them an interactive, tangible contextual layer. At the opposite, patents are among the most formal pieces of knowledge. But the use of properly designed SNA tools unveils their hidden informal nature. By uncovering citations, comments, and referencing and patterns of influence among clusters of linked patents and examinations, network analysis highlights intangible relationships. By changing our view on knowledge, we are able to consider it as formal or as informal, switching from an artifact to another.

Design is another great example of this “artifact switching”, which incarnates informal information gathered from customers, about their behaviors, conversations and wishes, into real-life formal products. This paradoxical co-existence, while difficult to leverage, is what ultimately keeps knowledge alive and useful.

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