The maker movement is increasingly finding its way into informal and formal educational settings. This chapter welcomes that trend and reflects on the cases in this book through five lenses, whereby informal and formal settings are contrasted. The first lens focuses on the development of a maker identity. In the formal setting in Delft (The Netherlands), for instance, students are expected to develop a professional engineering identity, which calls for certain task characteristics and a learning environment that differs from informal settings. The second lens focuses on what in being learnt: maker skills can be a learning objective in itself but making can also be a vehicle to learn other things. The third lens is about ‘what drives learners, what is motivating?’ The fourth lens is concerned with the value of working with tangible objects, and the use of different types of materials. Lastly, ways to sustain ‘making in education’, for instance by means of collaboration between learners, teachers and stakeholders is a lens that is used to shed light on contrasts between formal and informal settings.
professional development through informal learning In planning professional development for teachers or teacher educators, very often a formal course or training is offered. There is a lack of attention for the fact that a lot of professional development takes place at work through so-called workplace-learning (Eraut, 2004;Tynjälä & Heikkinen, 2011, Tynjälä, 2008). Raising the awareness of one's professional development through workplace learning might help to intertwine professional development with the performance of tasks. Professional development than becomes part of the job instead of an extra -workload increasing- task outside the job. In our research group, we are studying ways to raise awareness for informal learning. In this workshop we focus on a method that we designed, consisting of a learning report and an analysis tool. The workshop consist of three parts. We start the session with a short presentation of our study and the findings (15 minutes). After that, the participants of the workshop will work with the tools we have developed in our study to raise the awareness for informal learning (20 minutes). The results will then be discussed according to two questions: (1) what is your opinion on the analysis-tool; (2) what is your opinion on the use of this tool for raising awareness for informal learning on a personal and institutional level (20 minutes).
In Dutch policy and at the societal level, informal caregivers are ideally seen as essential team members when creating, together with professionals, co-ordinated support plans for the persons for whom they care. However, collaboration between professionals and informal caregivers is not always effective. This can be explained by the observation that caregivers and professionals have diverse backgrounds and frames of reference regarding providing care. This thematic synthesis sought to examine and understandhow professionals experience collaboration with informal caregivers to strengthen the care triad. PubMed, Medline, PsycINFO, Embase, Cochrane/Central and CINAHL were searched systematically until May 2015, using specific key words and inclusion criteria. Twenty-two articles were used for thematic synthesis. Seven themes revealed different reflections by professionals illustrating the complex, multi-faceted and dynamic interfaceof professionals and informal care. Working in collaboration with informal caregivers requires professionals to adopt a different way of functioning. Specific attention should be paid to the informal caregiver, where the focus now is mainly on the client for whom they care. This is difficult to attain due to different restrictions experienced by professionals on policy and individual levels. Specific guidelines and training for the professionals are necessary in the light of the current policy changes in the Netherlands,where an increased emphasis is placed on informal care structures.
Dutch society faces major future challenges putting populations’ health and wellbeing at risk. An ageing population, increase of chronic diseases, multimorbidity and loneliness lead to more complex healthcare demands and needs and costs are increasing rapidly. Urban areas like Amsterdam have to meet specific challenges of a growing and super divers population often with a migration background. The bachelor programs and the relating research groups of social work and occupational therapy at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences innovate their curricula and practice-oriented research by multidisciplinary and cross-domain approaches. Their Centres of Expertise foster interprofessional research and educational innovation on the topics of healthy ageing, participation, daily occupations, positive health, proximity, community connectedness and urban innovation in a social context. By focusing on senior citizens’ lives and by organizing care in peoples own living environment. Together with their networks, this project aims to develop an innovative health promotion program and contribute to the government missions to promote a healthy and inclusive society. Collaboration with stakeholders in practice based on their urgent needs has priority in the context of increasing responsibilities of local governments and communities. Moreover, the government has recently defined social base as being the combination of citizen initiatives, volunteer organizations , caregivers support, professional organizations and support of vulnerable groups. Kraktie Foundations is a community based ethno-cultural organization in south east Amsterdam that seeks to research and expand their informal services to connect with and build with professional care organizations. Their aim coincides with this project proposal: promoting health and wellbeing of senior citizens by combining intervention, participatory research and educational perspectives from social work, occupational therapy and hidden voluntary social work. With a boundary crossing innovation of participatory health research, education and Kraktie’s work in the community we co-create, change and innovate towards sustainable interventions with impact.
Every organisation needs to have organised Company Emergency Response (CER) staff. The training of CER must combine knowledge acquisition with knowledge application in performing physical procedures and demonstrating skills. However, current training does not secure well-prepared CER-staff in the long term. Playful learning is that a more engaging type of training can be created which combines knowledge with skills training. But while social interactions can strongly and positively impact learning as well as motivation, this is not easily facilitated within digital learning environments Two questions are particularly important for playful learning designers: • How can playful learning make use of the combination of digital and non-digital working mechanisms to foster learning and motivation? • How can trainees learn and play together if they are not always present at the same time in within the same learning environment? The saying at IJsfontein is that individually you can progress, but only together you can persevere. The aim of this collaboration with Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen is to provide playful learning designers with concrete and reusable design guidelines for leveraging social processes in playful learning across the digital/non-digital boundary. As such, we seek to contribute to the practically-oriented design knowledge available to the creative industry through design research that is grounded in practice. This type of design knowledge can only be fully developed when evaluated across different contexts of application. Therefore, we will form a consortium of partners from the creative industry to write a joint follow-up funding application
