Posts made by Bonnie Johnston

Thanks for this opportunity to play and get up to speed (although I thought I was up to speed until I logged into Google Wave...)

I like to discover new tools and play with them and often I abandon them except for the very few that really work for me (I'm totally twittered-out but I'm still so full of enduring and everlasting wiki-love).

I'm particularly interested in the third week that you have planned, especially the administrative side of just managing all of this, the logins, the passwords, the user ids, managing the addresses, etc. with students in an learning environment, and how to support faculty in this admin side (or not?).

Bonnie
Steveston, B.C.
(Busy people? it's still the 16th, right? :-))

What I like about SCOPE and why I've stuck with you is the really great moderators and presenters. You've had some really great people as well as people who are leaders in their field. What I like is access to them, the ability to get closer, in this informal but structured way.

Not sure about any changes. For awhile, I was irritated by the emails. But then, like others, I discovered that receiving the posts by email was a convenient way of following the conversation. So I like how the emails come automatically for each new seminar and it's up to me to login to turn them off.

In the future, I will echo Deidre's request for more on active learning strategies that are not discussion-based.

Thanks for the opportunity to participate!
thanks William -

Applying Paddy Fahrni's suggested definition of informal learning as learner autonomy to say, lunch and learn sessions, we can say that learners have the choice to attend a session that is being pushed out to them, as it is not a requirement of their profession or employment, but during the session, how much do they control? Do they drive the content of the session?

Sorry to be such a stickler on this, but I'm wondering if we're all talking about different things? Informal learning to me would be the pedagogically-related book circles and a lunch and learn that responded to learner issues a la Open Space Technology . Where I originate from (community based adult education), an organized lunch and learn with pre-deteremined objectives is still a formal educative intervention.

I'm wondering if we're really talking about formalizing efforts at professional development that are not conditional on employment, maintaining a license or a professional designation? I am all for this by the way - love formal lunch-and-learns, want to very much celebrate professionals who want to grow and develop, especially in the post-secondary environment and getting subject specialists to think of themselves as teachers as well. Is that what we're talking about?

- Bonnie
Hi Derek,
I'm very much in agreement with you regarding the importance of the question, "How can be allow in our formal taught courses the benefits and strengths of informal education?" and it's something I ask every day when I sit down at my desk as an instructional developer.

Where I was going with the (admittedly not well thought out) assumptions is much more nicely articulated by Christine Horgan, Paddy Fahrni and now Nick Bowskill over in the other discussion thread, "Should informal learning be evaluated?".

I entered into this discussion with my understanding of informal learning as being an expression of learner agency, and that learners will drive themselves to get what they think they need in whatever settings, formal or informal, if sufficiently motivated. But I got all muddled, and still am, when the discussion turns to credentialling, authenticating, evaluating, etc..

I am very interested in hearing about situations which formalize informal learning, while still maintaining the integrity of learner autonomy (eg. not the carrot-stick of continuing professional credits to maintain a license or professional designation)

- Bonnie
William,

Could you give further examples of what kinds of learning qualify to get stamped into a participant's passport? I can imagine that participating in a lunchtime workshop on using clickers is probably included, but what about maintaining a professional blog where the blogger is working out thorny profession-related problems?

From your description it also appears that participation is the sole criteria. I personally agree with this. It seems tempting to start down the road of evaluating the quality of the participation (and whatever other artifacts of learning you might get a stamp for), but I think it may backfire because it may become onerous to the evaluators, demotivating to the participants, and chaotic to manage if anything can be included (eg. I read this book and would like you stamp my passport, which is easy if I just have to show evidence that I read it, but what do you do if you have to evaluate the depth/breadth of my understanding?)

Something that concerns me is the underlying assumptions that I wonder about, that goes something like:

formal learning ->contrived
informal learning ->authentic

What I wonder is if we are trying to shove evidence of informal learning into an evaluative paradigm that is acceptable to formal learning.