Formal and informal learning experiences in ...

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2536536.2536616

Formal and informal learning experiences in multicultural scopes Francisco J. García-Peñalvo

Alicia García-Holgado

Juan Cruz-Benito

GRIAL Research Group, Educational Research Institute, University of Salamanca [email protected]

GRIAL Research Group, Educational Research Institute, University of Salamanca [email protected]

GRIAL Research Group, Educational Research Institute, University of Salamanca [email protected]

ABSTRACT

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The development of intercultural and multicultural competences and skills on lifelong learning processes has yet to be achieved, this means that main changes of paradigm still need to take place. Particularly in the field of education, it is necessary to move from traditional canons to open processes of creative interaction and build bridges by developing intercultural skills and competencies through educational and media programmes. This track is devoted to identify, share and valorize best practices and experiences (including technological and methodological issues) that focused on the development of intercultural skills and competencies in education, including both formal and informal approaches.

Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 [Computer Uses in Education]

General Terms Human Factors.

Keywords

Formal learning; Informal learning; Multiculturality; Competence; Knowledge management

1. INTRODUCTION

The Internet and its increasing use have changed informal learning in depth. This change has affected young and older adults in both their workplace and Higher Education contexts. But in spite of this, formal and non-formal course-based approaches have not taken full advantage of these new informal learning scenarios and technologies [10]. Web 2.0 or Social Web [22] is a new way to communicate people over the Internet that is changing the way users express themselves on the Internet. Everyone has the possibility to be a content author, a photographer, a video maker, a blogger and a thousand other possibilities, which has a great effect in the way people learn consciously or unconsciously. The social activities that occur in the Web 2.0 open and expand communication and interaction scenarios throughout complex and interconnected (ideally interoperable) technological ecosystems. Therefore, there is an information interchange taking place beyond interactions, and which is the perfect seed for informal learning. Open knowledge philosophy [13], Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) [17], communities of practice [23], or gamification [21] are examples of the current trends in education. These new realities and facts cannot be obviated by the organizations in their training programs and knowledge management strategies. This track aims to identify, share and valorize best practices and experiences (including technological and methodological issues) that focused on the development of intercultural skills and competencies in education, including both formal and informal approaches. The seed of this discussion forum is the end of TRAILER (Tagging, Recognition, Acknowledgment of Informal Learning Experiences) project [12], a KA3 European project devoted to advance in informal learning recognition by the learners and acknowledgement by the institutions. In a more specific way, the topics covered in this track are: •

Multicultural/intercultural educational case studies, best practices and experiences.



Informal learning competences discovering and recognition.



Technological ecosystem for enhancing multiculturality.



Multicultural/intercultural educational language patterns.



Open linked data and multicultural/intercultural resources.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a brief introduction of the informal learning concept; Section 3 introduces TRAILER project; and, finally, Section 4 presents the papers that compose this track of the TEEM Conference.

2. INFORMAL LEARNING John Dewey (1938) [9] introduces informal learning concept. This author considered that experience arises from the interaction of two principles: continuity and interaction. Continuity is that each experience a person has will influence his/her future, for better or for worse, while interaction refers to the situational influence on one‘s experience. Malcolm Knowles is another important reference in the origins of informal learning due to his attempts to develop a distinctive conceptual basis for adult education and learning via the notion of andragogy. This is based on the following concepts: self-concept, experience oriented, readiness to learn, orientation to learning and motivation to learn. He refers to informal learning as the use of informal programmes and, to some extent; the learning gained from associational or club life. According to this author, an organized course is usually a better instrument for new learning of an intensive nature, while a club experience provides the best opportunity for practicing and refining the things learned [18]. Other definitions on informal learning may be, for example, the spontaneous and non-structured learning that occurs in our daily life that go by in different contexts [6]; any activity involving the pursuit of understanding, knowledge or skill which occurs outside the curricula of educational institutions, or the courses or workshops offered by educational or social agencies [19]. Cross [8] stated that informal learners usually set their own learning objectives. They learn when they feel a need to know. The proof of their learning is their ability to do something they could not do before. Informal learning often is a pastiche of small chunks of observing how others do things, asking questions, trial and error, sharing stories with others and casual conversation. Learners are pulled to informal learning.

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Nowadays, technological and organizational innovation and, in particular, the affordances of the Internet, are facilitating an increasing access to knowledge and training for individuals. That ranges from formal courses to informal ad-hoc learning. However, the greater part of the informal learning remains unacknowledged, both inside and outside institutional and organizational contexts. Most companies are focused on formal learning programs only, thus losing valuable information on the know-how employees develop informally [5; 20] since many professional practices are equally or even more effective, such as informal meetings or simply coffee breaks [7]. In fact, it can be considered paradoxical [4] that companies spend 80% of their budget to re-qualify their employees by means of formal learning workshops and courses, while 80% of what their employees are really learning, is learned through informal learning activities. Though informal learning has always taken place, the advent of ICT, and particularly of the social media, has facilitated these processes and, at the same time, made them more perceptible. Nevertheless, there is an actual need for methodologies and tools to make visible these activities. Learners need to have a way to show the competences they have achieved by using informal environments along with a means to know what competences are the most relevant for a given institution. Moreover, they should take advantage of information generated by the system to find other users with similar interests. The information in the system will be useful both for users to demonstrate their learning and for employers and tutors to mentor their informal learning. As a result of its importance, informal learning is increasingly seen as an aspect of learning that requires attention. For example, the CEDEFOP “European Guidelines for Validating Informal and Non-formal Learning” [3] contains experiences of more than 20 countries in the validation of informal and non-formal learning. The ECOTEC European Inventory of validation of non-formal and informal learning (http://www.uk.ecorys.com/europeaninventory/) provides a catalogue of good practices in the area of validation for policy-makers. There are also several initiatives regarding informal learning practice and recognition, such as MyElvin Social Network for language practice [14], National Qualification Systems and EQF (European Qualifications Framework), TENCompetence project [2] that provides a set of tools to support lifelong learning, FREE (Fostering Return to Employment through Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity) that aimed at providing an interactive tool to be used by those who work with the unemployed, allowing them to gain different kind of skills to support individuals who want to start a business (http://www.spi.pt/free/), or TRAILER (Tagging, Recognition, Acknowledgment of Informal Learning Experiences) project [12; 16] that is going to be introduced in the following section.

3. TRAILER project

TRAILER project [12; 16] is an ICT multilateral project funded by the European Commission, started on January 2012. For two years, a group of researchers from seven European institutions are working together to develop an innovative ICT-based service, which should allow the learner to identify episodes and evidences of informal learning and which should allow the institution to recognize those informal learning activities in dialogue with the learner. The main objective of the project is to incorporate the consciousness of informal learning as part of an individual’s development; this starts with the identification by the learner of informal learning activities and the subsequent process in which these are made visible to the institution. This task will be done by developing methodologies and tools that will facilitate this process, making it transparent both to learners and institutions and allowing all the stakeholders involved to make the most out of these processes. TRAILER project involves learners and institutions. ‘Learners’ may be workers in a workplace, or traditional learners in an educational institution. Through transparency of communication, the TRAILER environment enables discussion between the different stakeholders and institutions concerning informal learning activities, the associated competences and how this information can be exploited. In order to achieve this, a staged methodology supported by a technological framework has been deployed. The TRAILER methodology defines a framework with several components and interfaces to make possible the interaction required. The framework is described in Figure 1 where it is possible to see a Personal Learning Network (PLN) that groups the tools that the user employ to learn in an informal way such as Wikipedia, Youtube, Games, Social Networks, LMS, Remote Labs, Expert Forums, Twitter, etc. This concept is derived from the concept of PLEs (Personal Learning Environments), which are learning environments that “provide students their own space to develop and share their ideas, through learning environments that connect resources and contexts so far apart” [1]. The framework includes a portfolio in which informal, non-formal and formal learning experiences can be stored and published. There is also an interface to facilitate gathering informal learning activities. We call this component the informal learning collector (ILC). Additionally, there are several institutional tools. These are: a competence catalog that facilitates a way to identify the informal learning

experiences taking into account learners or institutional perspectives; and an institutional environment that facilitates the analysis of the published information thus facilitating decision-making about learning issues related with the institution. Given this framework it is possible to define a workflow that makes informal learning experiences transparent to learners and institutions in such a way that both of them will benefit. Such workflow consists on: 1) The learner, after identifying an instance of informal learning that has taken place in her PLN, tags it using an interface known as the Informal Learning Collector with tags from a predefined competence catalogue. This information is then stored in a portfolio owned by the learner. 2) At a later moment the learner can review the range of tagged informal learning instances and can decide which of them she will make visible to the institution (her employer or her tutors). 3) The institution is able to view this information and analyze it. 4) The information permits a dialogue with the learner in order to agree on the competences that have been acquired through informal processes, and orient future activity. The information also allows the institution to plan formal and non-formal actions in the light of the informal learning that is taking place, and permits matching learners to others with similar interests based on their informal learning activity, interests and development. The TRAILER project facilitates the use of contrasting tools to gather informal learning activities. The most common tool is the webbrowser. Navigation to a web page, participation in a forum, reading a blog or seeing a video constitutes examples of activities that the learner might choose to submit. However these are not the only ways to gather information, some other significant ways to take into account informal learning activities by using tools on the cloud, such us game interfaces, remote labs interfaces and social widgets [15].

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On the other hand, the tools mentioned above can work in an independent way to carry out informal learning activities. However TRAILER project proposes a way to make such activities visible for the users’ institutions or employers. One of the TRAILER aims is to facilitate institutional decision-making by harvesting the informal learning activities carried out by their users. To do this it is necessary to gather all the activities carried out in those tools and others on the cloud, and provide to learners a way of classifying and publishing that information to the institutions [11; 15].

Figure 1. TRAILER framework [12]

4. TRACK ORGANIZATION This section describes in further detail the five contributions accepted to participate in this Conference track.

4.1 Using the TRAILER tool for Managing Informal Learning in academic and professional contexts: the learner perspective This paper describes, from the TRAILER project perspective, the perception of the users of the TRAILER ecosystem [15] regarding the importance and understanding of Informal Learning, but differed concerning tool usage. The overall idea of managing one’s informal learning was well accepted and welcomed, which validated the emerging need for a tool with this purpose.

4.2 E-portfolios in lifelong learning The second paper is also related to TRAILER project. This one is devoted to go in depth into one of the TRAILER ecosystem main components: the e-portfolio. Specifically, this paper describes how an e-portfolio could assists learners in gathering, maintaining and organizing their informal learning and competences in order to show and share this with others and present how this is implemented in the TRAILER e-portfolio.

4.3 Competence Web–Based Assessment for lifelong learning The third paper in the track is related to one key element in informal learning (also in formal one) management, the competences assessment. This paper presents the essential components behind a competence web-based assessment model that will lead to the design of our framework as well as some challenges involved behind a real scenario description.

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4.4 Early Professional Biographies - On the career entry and work experience of BA graduates in „Social Work“ This paper describes a study on the experiences of alumni of the BA-program “Social Work” just after they have leaved university. The study shows how the alumni get in their first job, how often they change the employer in the first three years, which competences they consider to be necessary and how satisfied they are with their first workplace experiences.

4.5 A methodology proposal for developing Adaptive cMOOC

The last paper in this track is devoted to introduce a methodology proposal oriented to design cMOOC with adaptive characteristics. As an emerging trend, MOOCs have a hype repercussion in technological and pedagogical areas, but they should demonstrate their real value in specific implementation and within institutional strategies. Independently, MOOCs have different issues such as high dropout rates and low number of cooperative activities among participants. This paper presents an adaptive proposal to be applied in MOOC definition and development, with a special attention to cMOOC, that may be useful to tackle the mentioned MOOC problems.

5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was developed with the support of the Lifelong Learning Program of the European Union. Project Reference: 519141-LLP-12011-1- ES-KA3-KA3MP. The authors wish to thank all the participants in the trials who largely contributed to the work presented here.

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[13] [14]

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2536536.2536616