Informality pays

Most authors don’t make enough from their writing to pay for decent haircuts. (That’s why most of us look disheveled.). Sure, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Covey, and Danielle Steele live high off the hog on royalties, but most authors are rewarded with credibility, fan mail, and good reviews. By those standards, today was payday.

Seeing the “Educational Economy” More Clearly
March 3, 2008

Review by Alex Kaufman, President, SelfReliant LLC, Redmond, WA

The value and ubiquity of informal learning is presented clearly and passionately by e-learning champion Jay Cross in this book. The notion of informal learning is very familiar, and most of us will understand immediately what Cross is getting at: every conversation, web site, conference, or collaborative enterprise tends to yield some new insight into the world. We are simply learning all the time.

The title of this review relates Cross’s notion to one of my own observations about ubiquitous learning – namely, the “educational economy”. Every one of these informal learning events is like a “transaction” in which some knowledge is shared, and in return the understanding or even reputation of the sharer is increased. The “real” educational economy, is very difficult to formalize, so what Cross would call “informal learning” is (to me at least) the portion of the educational economy that we have had trouble accrediting or otherwise keeping tabs on socially. Formal learning describes those artificial mechanisms, such as courses, (which Cross loudly proclaims are dead), that are easy to keep tabs on and can yield some educational benefit.

Informal Learning is, at its heart, a book rich with discussion of how we learn best, and what situations contribute to organic, self-driven learning – particularly in the workplace, but the ideas presented are really universal. Jay appropriately spends time discussing how the Internet has become the ultimate self-education tool, pointing out that “…my son and his peers [learn] everything from homework assignments to network administration on the Web. [That's] also where he learned a lot more than his dad ever did about meteorology, PERL, San Francisco politics, environmental action groups, obscure singers, and much more…”

I’d like to sum up here just by sharing a quote from the book that I included on SR’s website: “Many learners today are not self-directed; they are waiting for directions. It’s time to tell them that the rules have changed. It’s in their self-interest to become proactive learning opportunists.”

This morning I began writing Informal Learning 2.0. I’ll keep you informed.

Tagged as: enterprise2, informal learning, informl, learning, self-directed, web