The Internet, whether explicitly harnessed for learning or not, is creating more fluidity in the relations between formal and informal learning, enabling academics and students to work in different ways that create productive interactions between these two important, different but complementary social environments for learning: put simply, learning is now taking place on a continuum between more or less formality, rather than being strictly demarcated between the two
Two great advantages of the Internet for learning are normally described as communication and collaboration, with a particular emphasis on the ability of the Internet to provide richer channels and/or environments in which students can discuss their learning and work together. The power of such communication was evident to early utilisers of the internet for distance education since, in that mode traditionally, students only ever communicated with their teacher and not each other. The Internet, in the 1990s, greatly improved education for students who did not attend classes by providing (normally in a discussion forum but also sometimes in real-time chat) the chance to ‘meet’ and work with their fellow learners.
However, in most cases, these exchanges were the virtual equivalent of ‘formal’ learning in classrooms and, indeed, much of the development of online learning in the past twenty years has been designed to emphasise the replacement of co-present formal classes with better or equivalent online ‘classes’. The more that universities invest in and emphasise remote lecture delivery (Echo360) and video-based ‘virtual classrooms’ (Wimba, Elluminate), the more that they miss the fact that the Internet is also deeply effective (perhaps more effective) when used to support the informal learning encounters that are missing for students not on campus. Furthermore, for on-campus students – whose lives are now routinely very busy and not, in most cases, ‘lived’ on the campus – the Internet now serves as the primary means by which informal communication and collaboration can occur between classmates, well and truly outside of the confines of any virtual ‘classroom’.
Informal learning is essential to successful education. And, Web 2.0 applications, when used in a knowledge networking manner, significantly increase informal learning possibilities. However, they do not appear by magic: they have to be structured into the educational experience. In some cases, this inclusion results from the complex multi-affordance capability of Web 2.0 tools – where a website at which a student does some formal task (such as the online presentation in NET303) also includes commentary capabilities which other people, not necessarily engaged in the unit of study, can use to interact with that formal assessed task. In others, it results from the need for students to gather together examples of work carried out online and reflect on it, using a portfolio or similar aggregator to serve as the boundary between formal and informal learning.
Ultimately, knowledge networking creates a much more fluid environment within which learning occurs, without the hard boundaries between formal and informal. In part, this outcome is the consequence of screen-based multi-tasking where, for example, a student can be listening to an online lecture (formal learning) while also chatting to a colleague about it (informal); it is also the consequence of making private learning more public, so that a student who reads another’s finished assessable work on a blog, so as to gain insights into how she might do the task herself, is also engaged in informal learning (as opposed to the formal collaboration of being tasked to work with another student). Finally, this fluidity emerges from the re-centring of learning activities within the creative space of the individual student (a consequence of taking a student-centred approach within knowledge networking): when undertaking formal tasks with this greater degree of autonomy, more possibilities exist for students to combine them with informal learning engagements – with tutors, students, others or, even, just within themselves as they reflect on what they are doing.
