Archive for April, 2009

Cookin’ Up A Seminar at SCoPE: Evaluating Informal and Self-Paced Adult Learning

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

scope-logoWe are living in exciting educational times.  There are unprecedented opportunities to access professional and personal learning online of all flavors, in ways that serve our specific needs as individuals.

These opportunities raise issues for those of us involved in the learning profession as content developers, advisors, accreditors, evaluators, and, well, as learners ourselves.  How do we evaluate informal online learning experiences writ large – and for what?  How does evaluation of informal learning differ from assessing more formal online and face to face opportunities? What are emerging practices? How do we measure successes and how can we facilitate deeper learning? How do we understand learners’ experiences? In what ways do these opportunities and assessments interact with more formal learning?

What are your questions? How have you addressed these challenges? What experiences and resources do you have to share?

Already immersed in evaluating informal and self-paced adult learning? Starting to dip your toes into this domain? Just plain interested in some good learning-based conversation? … Well, come on over and join  SCoPE’s upcoming 3-week  seminar, Evaluating Informal and Self-Paced Adult Learning. We look forward to your participation in a community exploration of this topic, which launches on Monday, April 13th.

Below is the official description:

Informal learning is a key part of our personal development. It is also becoming a larger part of our working lives. But in an era of increasing accountability, we begin to question the role of evaluation for informal / self-paced adult learning…

  • What are existing rationales for evaluation of informal / self-paced adult learning (for the learner and the provider/developer)?
  • What accountability do we have to learners / providers/ funders?
  • What’s different about evaluating informal learning vis a vis formal learning?
  • What are emerging practices for evaluation informal / self-paced adult learning?
  • What are some challenges in the field?
  • What are the opportunities in the field?

During this 3-week seminar, we will begin to address these and other questions as we informally learn about the role and practice of evaluation in informal learning.

The seminar discussions are hosted on the SCoPE site – and be sure to join us on Friday, April 24, 21:00 GMT; 3pm ET for a live webinar (click here for time zone calculator). [updated to reflect correct time]

The seminar is coordinated by SCoPE’s Sylvia Currie, and is facilitated by William Owen, University of Northern British Columbia, and yours truly, Caren Levine, education consultant.

In many ways, this seminar relates to a previous SCoPE seminar on Informal Learning, which was facilitated by Sarah Haavind and Nancy White in 2006.

The seminar is free – just register on the SCoPE site to participate.  We look forward to seeing you there!!

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Reflections on My Recent Professional Learning

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

I recently took part in a telephone interview about my professional development preferences.  The organization that undertook the interview was interested in determining directions  for providing professional development for educators.  One of the questions I was asked was, “what conferences have I attended lately?”

Something felt odd about the question and, at first, I was not able to pinpoint what it was.  I mentioned a few conferences I had attended in the past year or two, but again, something kept nagging at me.  And then the lightbulb finally went off.

Over the past few years, I would say that my participation in professional development and learning has increased exponentially.  No exaggeration.  Not only that, but I have been able to create my own personalized menu of learning opportunities based on my various interests.

I am involved in communities of practice with other educational and job-alike/interest-alike professionals (which tend to cross professional boundaries, actually), and I have built up an incredible professional learning network through membership organizations and conferences as well as through online communities.

Most if not all of my more “formal” professional development activities recently have been mediated through online events – webinars, elearning, virtual enviroments (Second Life) and of course, ye olde conference calls. Admittedly, my professional life takes place mostly online, so I do not represent the typical educator. But I am seeing a growing trend toward the integration of online community and learning in the educational, nonprofit, and business worlds. And many of those people who are online are in fact people who are in the trenches, who turn to online communities for their professional and emotional nurturing in addition to face to face opportunities.

I’m not sure what this all means, except that I have been able to access people and resources that otherwise would have been difficult if not impossible to interact with. And I have been able to customize my own learning agenda and tap into experiences that are personally and professionally meaningful to me. Maybe this is the educational equivalent of the “Long Tail.”

[Note: a version of this post was published on jlearn2.0]

Posted in Professional Development, Technology In Action | 1 Comment »