Extracurricular activities (ECA) are informal settings offering free-choice experiences that are generally voluntary, open-ended, non-sequential, self-directed, hands-on, and evaluation-free. This mixed methods study investigates participation in a high school science ECA by collecting the memories of former student members for their perceptions…

This study focuses on learning about fish biodiversity via mobile devices in a situated learning scenario. Mobile devices do not only facilitate relating the presented information to the real world in a direct way; they also allow the provision of dynamic representations on demand. This study asks whether mobile devices are suited to support…

In Africa, as in many countries of the South, democratization is sometimes perceived as a process modeled upon outside--and specifically Northern--experience. Formal civic education programs in those countries arguably reflect the same bias and have not always been notably successful. Yet there are rich patterns of civic involvement and democratic…

All students today are increasingly expected to develop technological fluency, digital citizenship, and other twenty-first century competencies despite wide variability in the quality of learning opportunities schools provide. Social network sites (SNSs) available via the internet may provide promising contexts for learning to supplement…

This literature review, undertaken for Australian Industry Group, shows how multiple variations and combinations of formal, informal and non-formal learning, accompanied by various government incentives and organisational initiatives (including job redesign, cross-skilling, multi-skilling, diversified career pathways, action learning projects,…

The topic of informal learning and work has quickly become a staple in contemporary work and adult learning research internationally. The narrow conceptualization of work is briefly challenged before the article turns to a review of the historical origins as well as contemporary theories and methods involved in researching informal learning and…

This article aims to develop a paradigm of lifelong learning situations. The starting point is the EU-Commission policy document where three kinds of learning situations are identified: formal, non-formal and informal. The article tries to deepen this categorisation by searching for the underlying ontological and epistemological dimensions. The…

This thesis illustrated what can happen when academic culture disconnects from the cultures surrounding it. It showed that formal school environments are not always the best places to learn. A discussion of the debate between coherence and fragmentation learning theories illustrated academic chasms and a mindset that science education must…

International community development is a fertile area of research for environmental education scholars and practitioners. Although the community development field is well established, there is relatively little focus on education and learning in community development literature, especially in developing country settings. Particularly,…

The integration of formal and informal learning is increasing transparently in our daily lives. Leaders of higher and continuing education will benefit from better understanding why and how to formatively research and design effective popular informal learning such as educational podcasting. Using media that has a wide general public user base and…

Purpose: To date, little attention has been given to the circumstances in which the process of developing key competencies for sustainable development may take place. The purpose of this paper is to consider, the possibilities both of formal and informal learning and their relationship to competence development within higher education.…

This article presents the author's response to Joseph Reimer's essay titled, "Beyond More Jews Doing Jewish: Clarifying the Goals of Informal Jewish Education." Learning from experience, Joseph Reimer maintains, lies at the heart of informal Jewish education. Learning, Reimer explains, entails "going deeper": becoming immersed in the activities,…

MyArtSpace is a service for children to spread their learning between schools and museums using mobile phones linked to a personal Web space. Using MyArtSpace as an example, the authors discuss the possibilities for mobile technology to form bridges between formal and informal learning. They also offer guidelines for designing such bridges.…

The author examines the museum as a valuable resource for providing professional development within informal learning environments, especially in the area of science instruction and curricular methods. (Contains 6 tables.)

Exhibitions are a fundamental form of informal learning in museums. An exhibit should engage visitors in dialog with the material and its representation in a self-reflexive way in order to fulfill the museum's role of facilitating community dialog. (Contains 25 references.) (SK)