We are probably all aware that, if we think about it, we all learn something just about every day. We don’t go out of our way to learn things and we don’t go on prescribed courses of learning, we just pick things up. We probably do this more and more now that the internet is part of most people’s everyday lives.
How often have you ‘Googled’ something only to find, some time later, you have gone from the straight and narrow and found other information that is interesting, entertaining or maybe even essential – and probably learned or remembered something as a consequence.
This is loosely described as informal learning.
But, with the internet on your smartphone and those many little occasions in the day when you are travelling on public transport, waiting for someone or in between meeting, don’t you find you are engaging in this informal learning more and more?
Enlightened organisations can take advantage of this and provide their people with an element of structure to this informal learning. They research areas of information and provide lists of good links to which they have given provenance – they are approved by the organisation. In this way, their people can still browse and look for information but they waste less time as someone has already done a lot of the ground work already.
All this comes to mind as a result of reading a blog post written by Valentina Piccioli of Docebo.
This article presents and gives some details on a list of reasons why mobile informal learning might be motivating:
- control (over learners’ goals)
- ownership
- communication
- fun
- learning-in-context
- continuity between contexts
Click here to read Valentina’s article.