Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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Lastword Beware Who's Selling Informal Learning
DO EXPERTS SUFFER FROM THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE? DO THEY FORGET THAT THEY WERE ONCE BEGINNERS?
BY CLIVE SHEPHERD W
ith the proliferation of great social networking tools and the ever-increasing confidence that learners are displaying when it comes to managing their own learning, informal learn-
ing should rightfully play a central role in our future learning architectures. We will still have plenty of need for formal learning in the workplaces and colleges of the
future. Why? To some extent, because employers need assurance that critical skills and knowledge are in place. But mainly because employees themselves want to equip themselves with the core compe- tences of their new trades or profession, and it is really important to them that there is tangible evi- dence of their achievements through some form of certification. Perhaps even more importantly, lack- ing the elaborate mental schemas of expert practitioners, they desperately need structure and support; they don't know what they don't know and they don't know how best to address this. Therein lies my concern. Experts suffer from the curse of knowledge. Their responses to the
demands of their everyday jobs are mostly automatic. They find it really hard to empathize with the difficulties encountered by novices. They find formal, structured learning interventions tiresome and patronizing, largely because they no longer need the formality and structure. They cannot remember that once they, too, were beginners. They can no longer see the relevance of qualifications, forgetting that qualifications are only important if you don't have them. Given that it takes at least 10 years to become expert in anything (and often longer), most experts
are older, and informal learning tends to be most strongly advocated by older, very experienced, expert and independent learners. I happily put myself in this category. I haven't been on any sort of formal course related to my work
for more than 20 years and prefer to manage my own learning. When I was in my 20s and 30s, it was a different story. I set out to take advantage of every formal learning opportunity I could. Models like 70:20:10 only serve to confuse. As Ben Betts explains in The Ubiquity of Informal
Learning (www.ht2.co.uk/ben/?p=362), the model implies that we should be putting 70 percent of our effort into experiential learning and 20 percent into social. Yet, if the model has any use, it is not as a prescription for future projects but as a way of reflecting, as we look back on our careers, how much we have learned in different ways. Our learning architectures do need to encourage and support the experiential, the on-demand and the non-formal, but we shouldn't forget that the 10 percent can be an important catalyst for all other forms of learning, and a lifesaver for novices. So be cautious of oldies like me if, in their enthusiasm, they over-sell the idea of informal learning. We have forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.
—The author is an e-learning consultant based in the United Kingdom. Since October, 2005, he has been posting related blogs at http://clive-shepherd.blogspot.com. Email him at clives@fastrak-consulting.co.uk.
50 March / April 2012 Elearning!
