Formal/Informal in the Web Era. An update on the Issue

Informal learning practices are self-directed recreational, family and daily activities, not organised and structured in terms of targets, number of hours or learning materials. In most cases they are not intentional (e.g. learning from watching a film, travelling, volunteer activity, playing music in a band, etc.). In practice, there is no learning activity that does not mix together elements of formal/non formal and informal systems. As a consequence, learning is a convergence of heterogeneous learning systems, including less structured systems. In the early years of this century Michael Eraut sought to describe what motivates an individual and a community to acquire further knowledge. Motivations can be incidental and implicit, reactive or deliberate. This approach is further favoured by the digital environment, due to the immediacy of acquiring and re-using information, acquiring knowledge and producing “objects”. In the digital environment learning systems tend to interact. Indeed, not only training agencies, or structured and certified courses, are able to offer the knowledge needed to complete individual competences or the resources required by a “project community”. In particular, the mass media and the Web make up the environment for a myriad of individual learning courses, or at least for the acquisition of knowledge “chunks” that need to be organised and integrated with knowledge learned in the school curriculum. This hypothesis was first mooted by McLuhan in 1964, and corroborated early on in the 21st century in an interesting research conducted by Cofer. Based on objective data, it concluded that informal learning was in no way inferior in terms of scope and the construction of knowledge to formal learning. It should indeed be viewed as a proto-experience for formal learning. The chart shows – even before the explosion of social networks – that an hour devoted to Formal Education was the equivalent of 4 hours of Informal learning. This paper examines the challenges that the ongoing paradigm shift implies: evaluation, validation of informal activities in formal systems, building formal learning by informal activities, from a skill-centered perspective.