People who've been talking about feral learning - Jane Bozarth

Jane Bozarth (Author biography posted on Amazon)

A decade ago I moved from the world of traditional instruction to designing and facilitating both asychronous and synchronous training. Now that technology -- and learner access to it -- has finally caught up with possibilities, my interests have expanded to the world of social media tools to support and extend the work of the workplace training practitioner.

I have an M.Ed. in Training & Development/Technology in Training and a doctorate in Adult Education. (My dissertation, on workplace social learning/communities of practice, is available free via a Google search). I enjoy writing, and in addition to my books I was, for 10 years, a member of "Training Magazine"'s book review team and now write book reviews and a monthly column, "Nuts and Bolts" for the eLearning Guild's online "Learning Solutions Magazine".

You can find me "live" most anytime on Twitter @janebozarth and almost always on Thursday evenings as one of the moderators of the popular #lrnchat sessions. My Twitter profile describes me as a feral learner, positive deviant, and World's Oldest Millenial.
I also drive too fast.

profile posted at lrnchat.wordpress.com/whos-who/

7 Apr 2011 ... , http://twitter.com/JaneBozarth , AUTHOR,TRAINER,INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER, E-LEARNING SPECIALIST, POSITIVE DEVIANT, FERAL LEARNER ...

People who've been talking about feral learning - Gary Woodill

Gary Woodill

Psst…wanna hear something great?   (Posted on December 15, 2008 on Gary Woodill's blog)

As a “feral learner“, I am always searching for interesting sources of ideas and information. ...

DIY: Do-It-Yourself Learning  (posted on May 27, 2010 on Workplace Learning Today)

When change happens as quickly as it is now happening, there are few experts – just a few people running to keep up. Most of what I learned in university it not relevant to what I do today…and I’ve stopped taking courses a long time ago. Instead, learning has shifted to being a do-it-yourself operation, looking for answers when you need them, “learning by wandering”, being a nomad in a continuous search, a feral learner, and other metaphors of relative freedom from the confines of a classroom. The downside is that you have to know where to look, and what to look for, in order to succeed. The upside is often innovation and exhilaration. What is making it all easier is that knowledge is becoming more open, once exotic technologies are becoming inexpensive and can be easily ordered.

Reflection: How did I get here?

My mother was a secondary teacher, so one of the things I always promised myself growing up was that I'd never be one myself... which is a shame, because I L-O-V-E teaching, I just couldn't stand be a school teacher (!) I love learning new stuff, finding things out I didn't know before, testing my understanding and my thoughts against what other people know, and I love helping other people to discover the thrill of doing that.

Somehow though, that's not what school-teaching is all about. ECE, postgrad, workplace, anywhere else is fine - but schools and undergraduate university study are generally not. *sigh.*

When I left university with an Honours degree in economics I had had enough of formal study & promised myself I wouldn't ever go back. (It was a mediocre degree, university didn't engage or challenge me any more than school had. I've always regarded it as a double major - in Economics and Nightclubbing. As a consequence, the result didn't do me or the university in question much credit really. )

The thing that drove me back to education was having kids. In New Zealand we have a wonderful co-operative Early Childhood organisation called Playcentre (one word) where parents train to work as ECE 'teachers' learning child development, observation skills the ECE curriculum etc alongside their children. You get a very different perspective learning ECE pedagogy to support your own child and your friends' and neighbours' children from what you might otherwise. It can't help but be learner-centred. (Besides which, working in ECE settings is like herding cats - first of all you have to figure out where they want to go, then you work with that.... otherwise you're sunk!)

Once my kids had both gone to school I worked for about 5 years doing project management of course materials in a distance education institution, and as part of my PD there I began studying online in the University of Southern Queensland's M.Ed programme.

Postgrad rocks! You're allowed to have an opinion again - and to question and challenge and THINK FOR YOURSELF! I don't think it was just that I had learned by then to work to my own satisfaction, rather than anyone else's (although that was part of it), a big part of it I am sure was a difference in attitude on the part of the course leaders from what I had experienced in formal education anywhere before.  I loved it! Haven't finished my M.Ed yet, but I will (one day)...

The feral learning idea grew out of an assignment I did for a paper in Instructional Design. I once heard Marc Prensky quote his game designers as saying "You give an idea to an instructional designer and they'll suck all the fun out of it..." Frankly, I think they have a point - and not just instructional designers, professional educators across the board tend to fall into the same trap. And you know, none of those andragogy, pedagog or other-gogies actually describe how I learn, although Jack Mezirow's transformative learning is close (although he doesn't understand kids), and so is Linda Silverman's visual-spatial model. Why on earth not?

I was very fortunate to find myself participating in a group at CABWEB with Jan Visser of the Learning Development Institute (LDI), who was editing a book, "Learners in a Changing Learning Environment". Jan invited me to submit a chapter on feral learning (which I'd been holding forth on at some length) - so the ideas got formalised and incorporated into the book... which I'm very proud of.

So here I am... in a bit of a hiatus at the moment because Real Life has taken over again for a while - and developing my own PLN through interesting sites like Change the Schools,  Edutopia,  AERO,  Shifting Thinking and the like.

I wonder what's around the next corner?

Feral Learning in hard copy

One of the really exciting things that's happened in the hiatus since I stopped blogging has been the publication of Learners in a Changing Learning Landscape in Springer's Lifelong Learning series. Check out Chapter 6, Getting to know the Feral Learner.

Writing this chapter for publication was a great learning experience, and helped me to crystallise my thinking about feral learning.  It also demonstrated how much I still have to learn about preparing material for publication. I was very lucky to have Jan Visser's help & support.

The book is an interesting collection of perspectives on the 21st century learning environment and has just received this year's James W Brown Publication Award of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). We share the award with the authors of another important book that came out last year: Richey, R., & Klein, J. (2007). Design and development research. New York: Routledge.