PLEs and the new industrial revolution

Posted by Gina Rosenthal in corporate_training | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

This blog post discusses PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) and how they are needed based on how this new industrial revolution we are in is changing education.

The author discusses a 7-country study on ICT Learning (ICTs stand for Information and Communication Technologies) showed workers primarily use Google for informal-based learning. Quoting from the post:

Managers were often unaware of this learning, although they were frequently aware of the problem which inspired it. There were considerable differences in the use of ICT for informal learning between different enterprises. It would be tempting to ascribe these differences to age, sector, size or occupation but it is hard to discern such causal factors from the case studies undertaken. None of the employees in the enterprises studied had attempted to claim recognition or accreditation for the skills and knowledge gained through informal learning. It is not clear if this is because they are not interested in pursuing further formal qualifications or if it is because they are unaware of any opportunities of claiming accreditation for informal learning.

The use of the Google search engine as the major tool for learning is interesting. It raises the question of how people are framing their search terms, how they are refining search strings, how they are selecting from the results of search queries and how they are following hyperlinked texts. For a search result to be useful it needs to produce materials, ideas and concepts which can connect with the learner’s existing knowledge base on the one hand and deal with the issue or problem being addressed on the other.

The article gives a great overview of how industry has changed, and therefore education must change as well. There are so many opportunities as far as education is concerned, especially corporate education, to help people learn faster so that they are better prepared to compete.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.