FORMALIZING INFORMAL LEARNING: A PARADOX OR AN OPPORTUNITY?
FORMALIZING INFORMAL LEARNING: A PARADOX OR AN OPPORTUNITY?

Summary/Abstract: The recent growing importance of informal learning processes for people’s education, worldwide acknowledged, puts in evidence the question of promoting informal production and participation in communities of practice, in order to express an evaluation which can be representative of the whole learning experience of the individual. It implies a necessary dialogue between formal and informal learning environments, but not all informal production, made beyond formal boundaries, can be considered valuable. Although the presence of a teacher or an observer could inevitably influence learning processes within an informal environment, evaluation practices require a necessary reification of learning processes, as object of examination. So, students are obviously forced, in a certain manner, to explain their informal paths through reifications, that can be valued by the teacher. This kind of compromise implies a formalization of informal processes with a possible loss of authenticity owing to the unnatural implicit assigned task of making a reification. Formalizing means, therefore, losing a part of informal learning. The connectivist approach to learning practices can offer an interesting perspective through which knowledge artifacts can be filtered within a dynamic general system, where knowledge is conceived as a fluid and formalized artifacts represent a temporary static view of interconnected knowledge.

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