At ASTD TechKnowledge, people either loved our message or hated it. They were as firm in their position as they are on abortion or the O.J. verdict. Informal learning is a devisive issue!
How can people be so opposed to something that, if added to the status quo, results in better performance?
Upon reflection, I realized that this parallels the introduction of eLearning. Many people had oversimplified what eLearning meant; they defined it as replacing instructors with computers. This appealed to greedy venture capitalists and bottom-line-fixated executives, even if it was dead wrong from the start. Geez. (All learning occurs through a combination of different activites. Why should eLearning be different?)
The formal-versus-informal debate shouldn’t be happening at all. Extremists on both sides miss the point that this is not either/or. It’s shades of gray. Few human issues are binary, or, as I kid people, “bi-polar.” The world doesn’t work like this:
Permit me to borrow an analogy from a recording studio. You never hear what the musicians play. Someone at an audio mixer ups the volume of the Bono feed and downplays the drums. The result is much more pleasing to the ear. Making recordings is akin to taking photographs: a combination of what’s there and how one manipulates it.
Imagine, if you will, a learning mixer. You could slide the switches to give the learners a little more control here while shaving development time there. And so on. Here’s a hypothetical learning mixer.
You don’t achieve the best mix by moving all of the sliders to the top or all to the bottom.
The Delivery slider moves from courses and push (formal) to conversations and pull (informal). The Duration slider goes from hours (formal) to minutes (informal). The Subject matter ranges from curriculum (what the organization says, formal) to discovery (what the individual needs, informal) Timing goes from outside of work to during work. Development time ranges from months (events, formal) to minutes (connections, informal).
Learning professionals who are in favor of using any methodology exclusively deny themselves the opportunity to create the best mix. What’s not to like?
Follow Jay on Twitter
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I believe you’ve hit gold again, Jay!!
Your mixer is brilliant and can very simply explain the contemporary learning concept.
And to think it came from a feeling of not understanding someone’s reaction or getting a bit offended..??
Thanks, Meir. I think the mixer analogy may be a catalyst for unravelling the complexity of many situations. Bipolar thinking benefits no one.
jay
Couple of thoughts.
Informal learning is scary because it changes the power dynamic. You cannot add it to the status quo without changing the status quo, IMO.
I like the mixer analogy, too. I would add one more slider, that being “effort”. Informal learning requires more effort on the part of the learner, because it’s not chunked and sequenced by some “authority”. I think that’s why, in hindsight, we say that we learn more informally than through classes and lectures. The informal stuff takes a lot more cognitive effort on our part.
It makes me thing of the strategy employed by the Republican right.
Most people prefer to be somewhere in the middle on a sliding scale, and political opinion is no different.
So what the Republicans did, through the use of extreme viewpoints like Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter and Pat Robertson, is to shift the scale off to the right!
So now their former position – an hard right conservatism – now occupies the centre. And becomes the default choice. That’s how we see ‘balance’ attained on talk shows by having two shades of right wing represented.
You’re doing pretty much the same thing here. Take, for example, the scale between ‘hours’, ‘15 minutes’, ‘3 minutes’. Well the centre and the right are both informal learning selections. Why not a scale that represents the choices I had as an instructor: ‘3 hours’,'1.5 hours’, ‘50 minutes’?
What’s interesting is that the other thing you’re doing (and George Siemens does this too, and I just haven’t found the words to express it) is that you are co-opting the *other* point of view as part of your point of view.
It’s kind of like saying, “I support informal learning, except when I don’t.” George does the same thing when he describes Connectivism. “I don’t care whether you call it social constructionism.” I am not sure how to react – are you saying there is no fundamental different between your position and the other position?
What is happening here is that an attempt is being made to made what is actually a fairly radical position seem moderate by saying something like, “Oh no, it’s the same thing you were doing, it’s just tweaking a few variables.”
It’s fostering the ’science as cumulative development’ perspective where, most properly, it should be a ’science as paradigm shift perspective’. I don’t think it’s an accurate representation of th change that should be happening.
Company A wants employee B to take training course Z. Who makes the decision, the company or the employee? This is a binary switch – you can’t say “they both make the decision” – that’s corporate newspeak for saying “the company does”.
The sliding scale disguises this by using the general term ‘control’. But the point here is: either the employee is being told what to learn (some of the time, all of the time, whatever) or he or she is not. No sliding scale.
A lot of the scales are like that. They are very reassuring for managers (to whom you have to sell this stuff, because the employees have no power or control). You are telling the managers, “You don’t have to relinquish control, it’s OK, it will still be informal learning.” But it won’t be. It will just be formal learning, but in smaller increments.
In addition, the scales lock-in the wrong value-set. It’s like presenting the students with the option: what kind of classroom would you like, open-concept, tables and chairs, rows of desks? Looks like a scale, but the student never gets the choice of abandoning the classroom entirely.
The ‘time to develop’ and the ‘author’ scales, for example, both imply some sort of ‘learning content’. What sort? As determined by the ‘content’ scale. Something that is produced, and then consumed. It is manifestly not, for example, a conversation. It creates an entity, the ‘resource’, and highlights the importance of the resource.
The people who produce stuff will be relieved. Learning can still be about the production and consumption of learning content. They can still build full-length courses and call it ‘informal learning’.
Everybody’s happy. Everybody can now be a part of the ‘informal learning’ bandwagon.
What the slider scales analogy does is to completely mask the *value* of choosing one option or another. If you pick ‘more bass’ or ‘more treble’ there really isn’t a right or wrong answer; it’s just a matter of taste.
But if there is something to informal learning, then there should be a sense in which you can say it’s better than the alternative. Otherwise, why tout it.
You might say, well it is better, but there’s still those 20 percent of cases where we want formal learning.
Supposing that this is the case, then what we want is a delineation of the conditions under which formal learning is better and a those under which informal learning is better. The slider scale allows an interpretation under which everything can be set to ‘formal learning’ and it’s still OK.
To make my point, consider the criteria I consider to be definitive of successful network learning, specifically, that networks should be:
- decentralized
- distributed
- disintermediated
- disaggregated
- dis-integrated
- democratic
- dynamic
- desegregated
Now again, any of these parameters can be reduced to a sliding scale. ‘Democratic’ can even be reduced to four sliding scales:
- autonomy
- diversity
- openness
- connectedness
But the underpinnings of the theory select *these* criteria, rather than merely random criteria, because *these* specify what it is *better* to be.
‘Autonomy’ isn’t simply a sliding scale. Rather, networks that promote more autonomy are *better*, because they are more *reliable*. If you opt for less autonomy, you are making the network less reliable. You aren’t simply exercising a reference, you are *breaking* the network.
Now there will be cases – let’s be blunt about it – where it will be preferable to have a broken network.
Those are cases where learning is *not* the priority. Where things like power and control are the priority. A person may opt to reduce autonomy because he doesn’t *care* whether it produces reliable results.
There may be other cases where the choice of a less effective network is forced upon us by constraints. If it cost $100 million to develop a fully decentralized network, and $00 thousand to develop a centralized network, many managers will opt for the less reliable network at a cheaper price.
But the point here is that there is no pretense that the non-autonomous centralized systems constitute some version of network learning simply because they are, say, dynamic. For one thing, the claim is implausible – the criteria for successful network are not independent variables but rather impact on each other. And for another thing, the reduction of any of the conditions weakens the system so much that it can no longer be called network learning.
It’s kind of like democracy. Let’s, for the same of argument, define ‘democracy’ as the set of rights in the charter of rights:
- freedom of speech
- freedom of the press
- freedom of conscience
- freedom of assembly
etc.
Take away one of them – freedom of speech, say. Do you still have democracy? What good is freedom of the press, or freedom of assembly, without freedom of speech?
Bottom line:
If there is anything to the theory of informal learning, then the values it expresses are more than just preferences on a sliding scale.
Representing them that way serves a marketing objective, in that it makes people who are opposed to the theory more comfortable, because it suggests they won’t really have to change anything.
But it is either inaccurate or dishonest, because it masks the *value* of selecting one thing over another, and because it suggests that you can jettison part of the theory without impacting the whole.
An in the case of the particular scales represented here, the selection locks people into a representation of the theory that is not actually characteristic of the theory. Specifically, it suggests that informal learning is just like formal learning in that it is all about the production and consumption of content.
And I think this whole discussion points to the dilemma that any proponent of a new theory faces: whether to stay true to the theory as conceived, or whether to water down the theory in order to make it more palatable to consumers and clients (some of whom my have a vested interest in seeing the theory watered down).
And it seems to me, the degree to which you accept the watering down if the theory, is the degree to which you do not have faith in it.
If informal leaning *really* about duration, content, timing and the rest? Probably not. But if not, then what is it about? What are the *values* expressed by the theory?
Some ideas from linguistics may help here. There’s a difference in antonyms (oppsoites)between ‘contradictories’ and ‘contraries’.
Contradictories:
true/false
on/off
Contraries:
hot/cold
tall/short
Even big and small seem like contradictories but you can have a big flea and a small elephant.
So can we conclude that formal and informal are contraries on a continuum. Are they gradable like hot and cold?
Now this seems to solve the definition problem, but I fear it doesn’t. In fact one has to see these two terms, not as a continuum, but as two distinct terms with distinct clusters of meanings/examples, and a little overlap. This is why the mixing desk analogy doesn’t work – it doesn’t match linguistic reality.
A more useful idea is that of meaning in relation to family resemblence (from Wittgenstein), where terms don’t have fixed meanings but blend off in meaning to other terms that are related but not the same. One could use the analogy of informal and formal as being related like brother to sister. They are fundamentally different but share many common qualities.
Stephen, I’ll reply to your many observations after I have the opportunity to digest them. I need to ponder who’s re-defining the scales here.
Donald, I always learn from you so permit me a couple of quick questions.
How would you depict making the choices that go into creating a learning environment? Help me visualize it.
And where is the analogy to mixing music in a studio off?
Formal and informal are not analogous to brother and sister. Brother and sister are two distinct things. The learning experience that comes out of the mixer is a single thing.
Formal and informal are not so much contraries on a continuum as they are the feeling one gets from observing the result of many contrarites set by my mixer. E pluribus unum.
Wittgenstein confuses the hell out of me, so help me understand.
And Stephen, no I am not seeking Wittgentein lessons although I appreciate your capability of delivering them.
Stephen has put so much on the table, I’m going to start a new post to answer him.
Always torn between the need to present a theory/ a picture / a concept that will be understandable to many people that in their turn can contribute to the development of the field and to conceptualize a very complex and comprehensive structure, that in fact doesn’t bring much in it ( besides intellectual satisfaction to its conceivers).
Stephen goes against “Representing them that way serves a marketing objective”. Well, I thought that this is the main advantage of the mixer and in fact Jay’s main forte. Everyone can pitch in and in the end if a scholar wants to wrap everything up in a nice article for an academic journal- it’s also OK…
.
Much of what informal learning has to offer seems like common sense to me. My intuition tells me that people especially in the corporate world, might balk at the informal learning idea because they like to have things neatly measured. Say, number of butts in seats, numbers of eLearning courses developed, number of documents or .pdf files created, number of learning objectives met, how many people passed a post-test, etc.. Correct me if I’m wrong but unless you’ve clearly whether performance objectives are being met and can tie this success to the informal learning efforts, then it’s a hard sell for some traditional corporate learning consumers/stakeholders. I don’t completely agree with this. It’s just a thought.
I can see where Stephen’s coming from – he’s wanting a well-structured academic argument for the informal learning approach advocated by Jay.
But, actually, that won’t get the message across to the people that will invest in informal learning. Most managers, executives, whatever you want to call them, don’t read academic arguments – they respond to marketing messages: simple, clear pictures that they can understand and relate to.
We need both. Yes, Jay’s mixer has holes in it – but it’s a lot further on than any other picture of “blended learning” than I’ve come across.
Allow me, a newbie to the field of informal learning, to express my perception…
Informal and formal learning are not on a continuum – they are intertwined; In every classroom, courses, workshops, chat line, and at the coffee break I see informal learning everywhere. In a classroom – during a formal course – there is a lot of informal stuff mixed into it and it is basically inevitable and very good so.
Is there a need to DEFINE formal versus informal? Jay’s work is great and the downloadable poster on his site is providing me with a clear picture of what the concept of informal learning is all about. Actually I am not sure Jay needed to publish a book on it. Jay could have published the poster only – cheaper, less formal and to the point.
Stephen’s comment goes right above my head. I did not understand at all where you are going with this Stephen. I understand Jay when he says he will need a bit of time to digest Stephen’s comment. Why make it so complex? There’s formal and informal learning and everything in between, all blended together, integrating (or not) through a network to create a “life-like”:) learning environment.
I’ll read some more… I feel we’re making all this way too complex… and the good side of this post, I found new stuff to learn about!
And, yes, there’s a lot of marketing in all this!
Jay, this may echo some of Stephen’s points, but towards a different end.
First, let me say that Informal Learning is a valuable concept, and second that I absolutely agree that there seems to be a general, unnerving, love of false dichotomies.
Having said all that, the sound mixer analogy doesn’t work for me.
My issue is this: the analogy focuses on the content and delivery of training, not on how and why people learn. Yes, at the Informal end of each spectrum, the learner is in charge, but only in terms of reference that essentially belong in a traditional learning environment. (Hence Stephen’s jibe about it being a suitable marketing concept – although I see nothing wrong with that in itself.)
For me, the great benefit of the Informal Learning concept is that it challenges everyone – including Learning and Development professionals – to consider learning outside this traditional environment. It asks us to consider how and why people learn, and how we can facilitate this, rather than how we should most efficiently deliver training.
So, the detail on the poster works. I’m not sure that the sound mixer does. If I come up with something more positive to add, be sure I’ll share it.
It seems to me the mixer imposes a centralised, formal paradigm on informal learning. Perhaps to make it palatable, but that is being discussed elsewhere, but I would like to ask here about the terms you use.
Under control, you refer to laissez-faire, this means letting people do things, who lets them? It seems to me that this implies that control remains but is not exercised. Doesnt informal learning imply NO control, rather than a controlled lack of control?
Delivery. Isnt this a push word? Doesnt it mean “I bring it to you”? How does “I found it myself” fit with this?
Author. The very word implies creation before “consumption”. Is that how informal learning works? Isnt it more that whatever can be construed as content is only perceived as such after the fact in informal learning? Again isnt the idea of the author incompatible in informal contexts?
Duration. Why should informal learning be 3 mins max? I have been learning (very informally) about informal learning for 3/4 years now. I would not be sure how to break that learning up into 3 minute chunks, and I strongly suspect that to try to do so would be to reduce it enormously. Indeed as I write I am learning (we only learn fully when we try to articulate what we are learning – Kaplún) and I would argue that all of that process is bound up in what I am saying. And it is taking longer than those 3 minutes.
Content. The wording implies a dichotomy you are avoiding, when you say what the learner needs, whose definition of their needs are you referring to, the learners or the company’s. These may be radically different. Furthermore if it is discovery is it discovery of what others (the company perhaps) have defined as necessary or the learner’s emerging discovery of her own needs, which change as she learns and evolves?
Timing. In what way is learning before or after work, or during more formal or informal? We learn all the time, don’t we? And this may be organised formally within our work schedule? Or take place by suprise in the bar after work?
Lastly, time to develop. To develop what? Is learning (formal or informal) “developed”? Or is it content that is developed? I believe there is a substantial difference.
Jay:
What a tremendous conversation you started. No matter the fate of your mixer concept, the mere fact that it generated this conversation makes the concept well worth it’s time.
I like others am torn between saying go forth and spread this idea and agreeing with Stephen that it’s all smoke and mirrors. To annoy Stephen, I think it is a “both and” situation.
The mixer is not the ultimate, academically verifiable definition of informal learning, but it is a concept that may help sell learning solutions aimed at promoting informal learning to the corporation’s benefit to the higher ups.
That said, no matter which direction you lean, the analogy needs work. Guy Levert suggests that informal and formal learning are entwined with each other. I agree. A part of your analogy that you left out of the mixer is the interrelatedness of the various scales on a mixing board.
On a true mixing board, or for that matter the equalizer in your computer’s sound system, each of the scales is related to the scales next to them. If you move the lever up on one scale, the scale(s) to the left and right of it will also be dragged up as well – but to a lesser amount as you move away from the scale you’ve adjusted.
In the sound spectrum no section is independent of those around it. In your learning mixer, no scale is truly independent as well. Let me give an example from traditional college learning. Were you ever enrolled in a seminar class with 5 or six fellow students that the campus facilities office scheduled in a large auditorium with fixed tables? It doesn’t work. the space and configuration of the classroom interferes with the intended intimacy of the seminar.
Jay, you’ve latched onto a great idea. But it’s a diamond in the rough. Now the challenge is to cut it with the right number of facets and then polish it up so it shines. Not an easy task, if you’ve ever learned about diamond cutting, but one that can be just as powerful as the Hope diamond if you do it right.
Informal learning happens all the time, unless one is doing some repetitive drone task and not paying attention. Formal learning is good for getting the basic understanding of a field (eg: buy a text book and read it cover-to-cover). Informal learning is good for filling up the cracks (eg: browse the text book to look for specific answers to your questions).
The slider is quite appealing in its way of visually demonstrating that there are many variations of how learning can occur. You could do some corrections to the labels on the scales, of course, but I assume you just threw some reasonable values to get conversation going. For example, in the “Time to develop” slider I’d want to have value “No development necessary”, since in Progressive Inquiry, for example, learning happens as a focused, self-motivated group effort that doesn’t rely on learning material.
Stephens criticism seemed to me that he’s worried that your slider will allow people to just tweak some aspect of their educational practice, and not go “all the way to informal”. I see no problem there. Formal and informal learning are meant for different situations.
Now, my personal opinion is that the methods used in formal learning would benefit from being closer to the methods used by learners in their informal learning. No need to learn two distincs sets of skills if one of them is only applicable to primary education, and the other one to everything else in life?
Someone could start a wiki where people could describe different teaching and learning methods and approaches using a set of dimensions, like you’ve presented in your mixer. It would be interesting to see what would come up.
Additional comment to Stephen’s criticism about the marketing flavour of the mixer (for the geeks in the audience):
Extreme Programming used to be a “all or nothing” approach. Either you develop software traditionally, or you develop extremely. There was no middle ground. Problem? Very few people found they could go all out extreme with their established development processes.
Look at Extreme Programming, edition 2. It’s no longer “all or nothing”. Rather it describes a set of values, a set of principles based on those values, and a set of practices supporting those principles. While various practices have interdependencies and synergies, you’re quite free to adopt new practices one by one, as your process and people gradually adopt to the new ways of working.
Now I make a claim that this is how people learn and adapt best: Not all at once, but one change at a time. This is also how the educational institutions will change – changing one practice at a time, seeing how it works, adapting it if necessary, and continuing with the next practice when the first has become routine.
Of course, to get to this path, the institutions should be able to agree on the values they want to uphold and the principles they draw from those values. And changing people’s values is a hard thing indeed.
Hi Jay, Stephen Guy and all others,
I think the value of the mixer analogy is that it shows how formal learning can shift to informal learning and vice versa. Maybe the debate generated by Jay’s analogy brings out the more fundamental concept that has intrigued theorists for centuries, and that is “what is learning?”. In a formal and informal learning environments information can be gathered, stored, used, ignored, classified, discarded, etc. I have always felt that “learning” has occurred when I use the information to think, or to act. The stimulus to think or to act can come during a formal learning session AND OR in an informal situation immediately or some time later. The stimulus can be the simple fact that the sliders have moved and the significance of the information received appears and ignites my brain! When animating formal learning sessions, or when I am in conversation with somebody I always assume that I and the others will LEARN something eventually from the present experience. It can be in a corporate or social setting it doesn’t matter. Who cares who pays. Who care if someone pays at all? Sponsoring learning has nothing to do with informal or formal. What is important is that some or all of the information received in a formal or informal environment corresponds to the individuals learning needs. Only the individual can identify those needs and only the individual can determine if the info corresponds to those needs.
Folks, I am enjoying and learning from this conversation. I am particularly pleased that the dialog has gone intercontinental. But I would like to suggest a slight redirection.
Please bear in mind that my mixer is a metaphor. I didn’t mean to imply that someone in the studio is making all the choices; let’s leave politics out of it.
Nor did I suggest that the sliders are independent of one another; the best music results from a little of this or a little of that. The mixer analogy was intended to help explain that informal and formal learning are not separate things, but rather, the outcome of many characteristics. That’s why this gets complicated. I like Guy’s observation that informal and formal are intertwined, as long as we mean inseparably Epoxy’d together.
I am still having trouble wrapping my head around a recurring theme here. Specifically, I don’t understand how describing the characteristics of something implies there’s no larger purpose or value to it. Saying my Ferrari is red doesn’t mean that redness sums up the Ferrari. Saying that the duration of learning events is X doesn’t mean duration is all there is to it.
As I wrote on my other blog, I was inspired by David Cooperrider last month and am striving to look for opportunities instead of problems.
Permit me to make a suggestion. Rather than redefining learning, quibbling over semantics, or restating what’s already been said, how about we try to unearth ways to take advantage of informal learning to increase people’s fulfillment in work and life?
{ 5 trackbacks }