Lifelong Learning, Informal L earning & IT

1. Lifelong Learning, Informal Learning & IT Pamela Carson Web Services Librarian Concordia University, Montreal

2. What’s lifelong learning? • Empower people to manage their own learning in many contexts throughout life • Roots in John Dewey’s philosophy of progressive education

3. What’s informal learning? • Learning situation where some combo of • Process • Location • Purpose • Content is determined by the learner, who may (or may not) be conscious that learning happened (Carliner, 2012)

4. Why these topics? Why now? • Knowledge economy • knowledge workers • I often ask myself “How does he/she know that?”

5. Who else is doing it? • IT workers (Gijbels et al., 2012) • Open Source Programmers(Brown, 2008) • Software Engineers (Enes, 2005) • Googlers(Johnson & Senges, 2011)

6. How do we foster it? • Capacity building • (McManus, 2011; Johnson & Senges, 2010) • Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory • (Crick & Yu, 2008) • Organizational supports / Knowledge Management • (Johnson & Senges, 2010)

7. How do we measure it? • Lifelong Learning Support System • Up-front needs assessment • Back-end evaluation(Kraigerand Wolfson, 2011)

8. Criticisms of lifelong learning • Responsibility for education on the individual • Tends to support status quo • Who wants to learn forever?(Hager, 2011)

9. Takeaways For Yourself • Recognize informal learning • Career plan • Performance reviews • Develop capacity for lifelong learning • Seek out informal learning For Your Organization • Use KM tools and concepts to encourage knowledge sharing • Be a lifelong learning role model

10. Research plan • A case study in Canadian academic libraries: Web Services Librarians’ approaches to technology-related lifelong learning • Semi-structured interviews with Canadian Web Services Librarians • 15±10 participants

11. Thank you pamela.carson@concordia.ca