Flashback: DIY vs. Formal Learning

I was looking through my blog recently, finding some old nuggets from my early days (which was all of two years ago!)

This post stood out: DIY vs. Formal Learning.

So what's changed in the past two years with the rise of social media tools? Are more people doing it themselves? Is the economy pushing that change?

Informal/DIY Learning: Montessori School for Adults?

We've been exploring the notion of sending our son to a local Montessori school come this fall. He'll be 4. So last week, we had the chance to take a tour of the school, peek in on some classrooms, and ask a lot of questions.

My first response was, "I want to go to Montessori School." It looks awesome.

Now, I don't know all the theory and I've only read a bit about Maria Montessori (the founder of this approach) and the Montessori Method. But there seem to be some similarities between that and informal learning/DIY learning -- all this adult stuff we've been talking about lately.

A brief description of the Montessori Method from the Montessori.edu website:

It is a revolutionary method of observing and supporting the natural development
of children. Montessori educational practice helps children develop creativity,
problem solving, social, and time-management skills, to contribute to society
and the environment, and to become fulfilled persons in their particular time
and place on Earth. The basis of Montessori practice in the classroom is
respected individual choice of research and work, and uninterrupted
concentration rather than group lessons led by an adult.

Here's what I see:

Kids get to choose what they want to do for their "work" each day. If your kid just wants to polish brass for three hours, so be it. That's where he needs to be . And he's learning some great skills. Self-directed.

Kids go at their own pace. Polish brass for 10 minutes. Pick up a puzzle. Eat a snack when you feel like it. (How revolutionary! The snack table is ALWAYS set up. I like that.) No forced transitions. No "Now is the time we color. Now is the time we sit on carpets and listen."

Kids define their workspace. Role out a mat on the floor and voila! -- you've got your boundaries and your workspace -- your "office" all set up.

Learn from your peers -- water cooler style. Classrooms are made up of mixed ages. Big kids model new activities for the little ones. Little ones learn by observing big ones and asking questions. Mentoring occurs at the peer level.

Teacher is often in observe mode. When the teacher sees that the child is ready for the next challenge, he or she may step in and do some one-on-one instruction. I guess this is the "formal" part. The seminar or workshop. But again, it's customized for the child. "I see you've mastered the sandpaper letters....let's see what you can do with the block letters." It's the manager seeing what questions need to be asked next and stepping in.

This informal style is the rule, even at the middle school level. Classrooms have tables in circles. And couches. Kids work on their geometry homework together or alone. Whatever works best. The conversation seems fluid and open. And learning is going on all around.

So, the question is, can we make the Montessori Method a part of the coporate learning environment? Is that what all this informal/DIY/learning 2.0 stuff is all about?

DIY vs. Formal Learning

DIY Learning (Do-it-Yourself) is the term of the week, it seems.

Elliot Masie's most recent Learning Trends newsletter leads with the headline "DIY: Do It Yourself Trends". He quotes an article by Dion Hinchcliffe in ZD Net in which Dion states,

The idea of DIY (Do It Yourself) is to get developers and IT departments out of
the demand loop and letting users self-service themselves.

Eliot goes on to talk about how "Content Widgets might add to the creation of learning assets" and the rise of "Do It Yourself Content creation."

Harold Jarche says, The future of learning is DIY:

This is the power of informal learning, if organisations decide to enable it. It has to be DIY, user-driven and uncontrolled. People will figure out what’s best for them, as they have for millennia.

Brent Schenkler has been on a soapbox recently, talking about the death of ISD in the wake of informal learning. He responds in DIY not ISD:

I can over-simplify the issue significantly and state the following: ISD is only necessary when you are mandating learning to unwilling participants...for everthing else we do indeed learn it ourselves.

This is a very interesting conversation... and seems like a no duh to me. But then, I've been working in small organizations for the past 11 years. Small companies rarely have money or time for formal training programs. These flatter organizations tend to be more transparent. A staff meeting includes all ten of us -- opportunities for knowledge transfer are endless. In small companies, DIY/informal learning is pretty much all you got. It's a way of life down here.

It's been years since I've taken a formal training program for work. (I went to school a few years back to learn a completely unrelated trade. That was definitely formal classroom training. I had teachers. Tests. Grades. Report cards. And tuition payments.)

Ironically, I've never taken an e-Learning course, although I've been producing them for over decade. Or rather, I've never been mandated to take an e-Learning course. I check 'em out on line in the name of professional development -- see what all the other vendors are doing.

Lately I've been taking e-Learning courses on e-Learning -- because I want to learn more. Because it's out there. And I can. I'm getting a Masters Degree in Instructional Design. And it's free. Free range. Free of cost. "User-driven and uncontrolled" as Jarche says. Of course, I won't get a grade and I won't have fancy letters to tack on at the end of my name. But I'll have the knowledge and the confidence that I know what the hell I'm talking about for once. Maybe.

So is the world of the Large Corporation so different? I guess it is. You've got Compliance. And Standards to live up to. And Managers to report to. And Performance Competencies that your LMS tells you you need to have in order to get that raise you want. And there's all that $ that needs to get spent on something, right? Do folks have time for DIY when they've got all these other things to live up to?

Large Corporations, it seems to me, need to learn something from us small fries down here where free-range, DIY, informal learning is a way of life by necessity, by design, because it makes sense.

The sticking point, however, for those Large Corporations are Brent's "unwilling participants". Smaller organizations typically have to weed out those unwilling folks; large corporations have to stick with 'em. They serve a function. They have necessary skills. But they don't always feel like training or learning. So how can you expect these folks to embrace DIY learning?

To Brent's unwilling participants, I might add those learners who don't even know what questions they should be asking. I wrote about this a little in an earlier post Informal Learning: Getting Learners to Ask the Right Questions. This is where ISD still plays a role. Or maybe it's not the ISD our mothers' told us about. Maybe it's managers or mentors who have to provide guidance -- on-the-fly instructional design.

(I do think DIY Learning is a better term than Informal Learning -- if we're gonna use labels at all.)