In this paper the focus is on professional development through informal learning. People learn a lot while performing tasks and doing their jobs, but they are not always aware of these processes. Encouraging the awareness for informal learning is a first step towards acknowledgement of informal learning activities as forms of professional development by teacher educators and their managers. In this paper, we describe a procedure to encourage awareness of informal learning. The procedure consists of keeping a logbook on learning experiences during three weeks. At the end of the period the participants discussed their experiences in a meeting and analysed their own logbooks using an analysis tool. Both keeping a logbook and analysing this logbook led to a raise in the awareness of informal learning, at least, during and shortly after the intervention. The participants got to know their own learning processes, found the logbook-keeping an interesting thing to do and sometimes were surprised by the ways they learned.
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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).
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Professional development of teacher educators is an important issue. In order to be able to teach the teachers of the future, teacher educators have to keep their own knowledge and skills 'future proof'. When it comes to professional development, very often people think of 'attending courses'. But attending courses to keep up knowledge and/or skills, is only a small aspect of the broad range of possible activities to fill in ones professional development. A lot of professional development takes place at work, the so-called workplace-learning or informal learning. In this study we look at the professional development of teacher educators through informal learning. Often forms of informal learning are not recognized by the learner, because they are so integrated with work. In this study the goal is to stimulate awareness of informal learning processes by teacher educators. Teacher educators use a logbook and report daily, weekly or once in three weeks what they have learned. After a three-week period they analyse their logbooks by looking at 'what is learned, 'how is learned', with or from who is learned'. This study has two types of outcomes: (1) awareness of the informal learning processes of the participating teacher educators themselves and (2) insights into the processes of stimulating awareness of informal learning processes. The study is in progress (march 2012) and we will present our findings at the conference in Antwerp.
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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
