Mashup content for passionate learners: bridge between formal and informal learning

We have recently visited the World’s largest building, the Boing manufacturing plant, and have seen the 787 ‘Dreamliner’. It is a beautiful aircraft. The engineers who designed it, just like those who designed the enormous building in which it is assembled, are clearly competent practitioners. How they achieved this high level of competence? They started with formal multidisciplinary education in their primary and perhaps secondary schools. They learned to sing, to read, to calculate. Later on they went through formal education dominated by their respective engineering disciplines during their university years. The outcome of the university is a cultivated mind – however, this cultivated mind is formal and not ready to produce incredible things, such as the Dreamliner or the building in which it is assembled. When the cultivated mind meets passion, Passionate Lifelong Learners continue learning in the context of their praxis through informal modes of learning. Thus competence emerges through the dynamic relationship of knowledge, the knower and the context. In this chapter we examine the road to becoming competent, particularly focusing on informal learning, for which the teacher is almost superfluous. But only almost…