Abstract:

A few years ago Nicolas Carr gave his book the title “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”. He describes how the newest achievements of information technology distract us from focusing on one single thing at a time. The information overload is urging us to continually browse and “quick-scan” contents. Nicolas Carr has taken it upon himself to emphasise the negative aspects of internet this way. For us the phenomenon of the Shallows is not good or bad, it is simply the fact of life and part of the conditions in which Post-Experiential learning takes place: the Post-Experiential learners are Shallows. In this super-specialised world the only acceptable way of knowing is to know everything that can be known about a very small number of things. It is worth abandoning this super-specialised world in the informal education. We believe that the informal learning of tomorrow will be located on the other end of the continuum, in the realm of the Shallows, where it is acceptable know a little about many things. It seems obvious that the Post-Experiential learners engaging in such informal learning will only be learning what they are passionate about, therefore we call our learners Passionate Learners. If formal learning is a walk through the zoo where zookeepers show the paved way, the increasingly informal and social learning is a “walk through the savannah”.

Donald Schön more than thirty years ago introduced the concept of the reflective practitioner. As the first step, we consciously need to look back at what we have experienced and reflect on it; this is called ‘reflection on action’. We use the web of concepts acquired in formal education, and from a selection of these concepts we create a mirror and we look into the reflection of our experience in this mirror. If we reflect more than once on the same experience, we will notice that our interpretation changes. Finally we will be able to reflect on the experience as we are experiencing it; this is called ‘reflection in action’. An accomplished reflective practitioner will be able to reflect on her/his experience real time and also change it in action. Experienced professionals certainly do not need to go through the same teaching material they have learned several years back as students. If there is new knowledge in a particular discipline that is relevant to the experienced professional, (s)he may be willing to get back into the classroom to learn the new concepts in a formal way, but then they also want to apply this new knowledge. The really difficult thing is finding the right proportion between formal and informal way for knowledge refreshing.

In recent years, Stephen Denning becomes an organizational storytelling guru. It is difficult to accept that the narration is stronger than the 21st century sophisticated business analyses. The humorous stories are perfect for displaying a few minutes of moving image sequences, in which most of the gags simple physical humour; comical fights or cake battle. They summoned the little world of burlesque or slapstick, in which the main character is looking for a way out of absurd situations. “What does laughter mean?” Henri Bergson begins his work on Laughter with this simple and general question. His intention is to analyse the things that make us laugh in order to find out how it is that they make us laugh.

Keywords:

Informal Learning, Passionate Learners, Reflective Practitioner.