I’m not sure what this post will have to do with distance education, but it’s what is on my mind after reading a couple of interesting posts from my colleague in this BlogTracks, Denise. She is focusing her research on informal learning in DE environments and gives a definition of informal learning as coming from Falk, Scott, Dierking, Rennie, & Cohen Jones (2004):
shifts in attitudes, values, and beliefs; aesthetic understandings; psychomotor skills, such as discovering how it feels to turn a pot or play an instrument; social/cultural dimensions such as learning about someone in your family; and process skills such as thinking critically and refining one’s learning skills, or perhaps even learning more about how to use a museum for lifelong learning. (p. 172)
She then concludes by asking, “See? Messy. How on earth do you begin to assess this, particularly when
the learners themselves are often unaware that they have learned?”
Indeed! How can you measure informal learning? This is a question I’ve thought about a lot in the past because I am interested in evaluation studies, but also have interests in studies about communities of learning and human interaction impacts on learning, which involves a lot of informal learning. So I believe personally that these messy, non-cognitive aspects of education, can have as big, or bigger, impact on a student’s future happiness, success, and lifelong learning as cognitive aspects. I think it matters a great deal more what a student can do, how they control their own emotions, regulate their own motivations and actions, relate to others, and develop inner integrity, rather than what they memorize from a textbook.
And yet it’s the latter, what they memorize from a textbook, that you would think is most important because of recent policy emphasis on test scores. I don’t believe that this textbook learning is as important as informal learning. Can I prove it? Not really, because of what Denise said: How do you assess it?
This brings me to another question: If you can’t assess it, is it then not important? Of course not. To argue that is silly. There are a lot of things that are important that are difficult to assess. But if we require educational goals to be tied to assessments, then we are requiring educators to ignore many other important aspects of learning.
As I write this I am cringing. Do I believe educators should be accountable to do a good job? Yes. Do I believe we should care that students do better on tests and have basic math, science and English skills? Yes. So I do believe in testing and using tests to guide teaching. I just don’t want to also ignore the messy, harder-to-assess-but-still-important educational goals.
Another thought on my mind this week is my own four-year-old attending school for the first time—full-time preschool. As I watch her go to school and see the classrooom situation, it is easily apparent that she’ll be learning a lot of wonderful things. But I wonder what kinds of informal learning she will pick up that I might not want her to learn so young? She will now spend as much time associating with a teacher I have met for only 10 minutes, and students I haven’t met at all, than with me and her mother. Will she pick up more values, attitudes, expectations, etc. from her teacher or from me? Hopefully her teacher has a lot of the same values, attitudes, and expectations that we do so that it doesn’t matter too much, but who knows?
This long rambling of a personal nature, I guess, comes to this point: I agree with Denise that informal learning is a much more powerful component of who we become than we tend to think, and is much more important than current educational policies account for. We should be thinking a LOT more about what students are learning informally, and it’s embarrassing that there is so little research done about informal learning on the web, since so many young people spend so much time on the Internet.
Go Denise! Fill that research gap! 🙂
technorati tags:blogtracks, AECT2006, Blogtracks2006, AECT, informal, learning
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