Ecollab2 - Can we formalise Informal Learning by Simon Bostock

Ecollab ask the question for their second blog carnival: Informal learning - can we formalise it? Should we? How much? How?

1. Can we? Is it practical?
Any organisation seeking to 'formalise informal learning' would be simultaneously 'informalising the formal' ie potentially ie undermining the bureaucracy and promoting adhocracy. This is radical stuff - we're talking about changing the maze not the rat.

Can we formalise informal learning? It depends on who 'we' are. . .

2. Should we? Can we even define what it means?
This is even tougher. 'Formal' is a slippery word - a mode of speech favouring latinate lexical terms over good ol' germanic grunts; something made explicitly 'official' by signing on the dotted line; something rendered into abstraction. . .

Wrapping a field up in its own technical vocabulary is undeniably useful as an aid to precision and clarity, as well as a shared foundation to build on. But colonising learners' minds with a layer of metalanguage seems to defeat the purpose of informal learning. And seriously raises the barriers to active participation.

Official sanction of informal learning sounds great in theory. Everybody knows it's the way things are done round here and at least you get to have a budget. But odd things happen to gift economies - for this is what unofficial informal learning is - when incentives ie a budget get thrown into the mix.

 

But it's wrong. In fact, all abstractions are, by definition, wrong. Dick uses Bloom's Taxonomy to explain why lecturing won't work and it works well for the audience he's writing for. But here's David Weinberger on the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy (another abstraction, and one that I learned as received wisdom during management training):

The real problem with the DIKW pyramid is that it's a pyramid. The image that knowledge (much less wisdom) results from applying finer-grained filters at each level, paints the wrong picture. That view is natural to the Information Age which has been all about filtering noise, reducing the flow to what is clean, clear and manageable. Knowledge is more creative, messier, harder won, and far more discontinuous.

Real life is messier and more discontinuous. Bloom's Taxonomy has remarkably similar problems to the DIKW hierarchy. We produce abstract models as tools to think with and to act as social objects when we talk to one another. This fact gets lost.

Worse still, when we 'formalise' things, we tend to get mixed up between all three of the loose definitions there are. The result? We end up with officially sanctioned, uncritically accepted hairballs of jargon.

Should we? It depends on what we mean by formalising. . .

How much? And when and where?
Leaders are ready, we've clearly defined what 'formalise' means: how far do we go? Where do we start?

One thing I'm fairly sure of: it's one of those things where it pays to put a lot of effort in up front because being seen to interfere later on could have negative consequences (this doesn't absolve senior managers and Learnign & Development people of responsibility later on - the whole point is that everybody's supposed to take part):

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