The controversy surrounding the formal/informal roles has suddenly created a flurry of excitement around a post on eLearn Mag. However, I’ve addressed it over at the TogetherLearn site, as it seemed somewhat appropriate to respond from the perspective of a champion of social and informal learning.
In short, I point to the issues covered in the Broken ID series, and say that formal instruction isn’t the greatest thing to champion in it’s current form. It may persist, but hopefully in a far better state than most formal we see today. No one’s championing the demise of formal, but certainly improvement, and in conjunction with informal, not as a single solution.
I don’t understand the controversy here. Both the original Elearn article, and this blog post agree that the informal and the formal have a place in the training world. Am I missing something?
Richard, I guess the first controversy was the claim that all the posters to the LC Blog were calling for the death of formal, which wasn’t supported by the blog posts themselves.
The second controversy was the complaint of the lack of quality of informal, which I questioned. Informal *can* be bad, but then so can formal. Blindly trumpeting the value of the classroom seems misguided. The article seemed one-sided was the major complaint, I reckon.