Lifelong Learning in Information Age Hongmei Wang School of Information Sciences and Technology Pennsylvania State University State Colledge, PA 16803 USA +1 814 865 6176
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Lifelong learning is part of our life and we need it in our lifespan. This paper describes its concept development history, discussed its key component and characteristics and introduces the studies on assessment of it based on literature review. The concept of lifelong learning was rooted at the concept of adult education, then evolved to the lifelong education and finally to lifelong learning. The most important component in lifelong learning is the motivation, which drives the learner to learn. Due to the motivated nature of lifelong learning, it has four new forms of learning contributing to lifelong learning, including selfdirected learning, learning on demand, informal learning, and collaborative and organizational learning. Along with these various forms of learning, there are many significant differences between lifelong learning and formal learning. Considering the purpose of improving current formal learning, there are some attempts to induce lifelong learning into formal learning and also some initial studies on assessment on lifelong learning. Some challenges in lifelong learning are also discussed in the paper. Keywords
Lifelong learning, lifelong education, adult education, motivation, formal learning, new forms of learning INTRODUCTION
Work environments of the 21st Century place people in an information-rich world. New technologies and new information come to people very day. People need to deal with the changing environment in order to live well in the world. What people have learned in the school may be sufficient for them to handle the job in their workplaces. People need to catch up the gap between the school and the workplace. The traditional division of a lifetime is not appropriate for the current and the future education of people. The current education units still are lecturedominated and curriculum-dominated. They do not facilitate cultivating the students to learn the learning skill in their future lives. In the information age, the knowledge and competencies are becoming major components of competition between countries, business companies, and individuals. People need to learn across the lifespan in order to adapt to the changing nature of the information age.
The idea of lifelong learning is not new. There are various definitions of lifelong learning (Cropley, 1978; Livneh, 1988; McCombs, 1991). One comes from Candy(Candy, 1991) as “Lifelong learning takes, as one of its principal aims, equipping people with skills and competencies required to continue their own “self-education” beyond the end of formal schooling”. So, it is critical for today’s people because of the fast-changing nature of information age. As Fischer (Fischer, 2000) said, “Lifelong learning is more than training”. People need to learn by themselves in order to adapt to new environment after training. The lifelong learning involves learners of all ages and all backgrounds in acquiring and applying knowledge and skills in various contexts. Lifelong learning can exist in various situations where the learners live with different forms, self-directed learning, learning on demand, informal learning, and organizational learning(Fischer, 2001). The lifelong learning has impacted on the learners’ lives, changed their mindsets(Fischer, 1999). New technologies offer new possibilities for people to learn in their lifespan. New technologies and new processes also provide new challenges for people in their lifelong learning process. This paper follows a brief review on the evolution history of the lifelong learning concept. The studies on the importance of motivation, the most important component in lifelong learning, were reviewed then. Further more, four different new forms of learning contributing to lifelong learning are summarized and discussed, including selfdirected learning, learning on demand, informal learning, and collaborative and organizational learning and characteristics of lifelong learning and formal learning are compared too. Initial studies on measuring lifelong learning are described following the discussion on the characteristics of lifelong learning. Finally, the conclusion and some challenges in lifelong learning are discussed at the end of the paper. DEVELOPMENT OF LIFELONG LEARNING IDEAS
Eduard Lindeman (Smith, 1996) proposed the view that self-conscious adult education should be lifelong. He argued in his classic book The Meaning of Adult Education (1926) (Lindeman, 1961) that “The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no endings”. This whole life of learning is called adult learning because
“adulthood, maturity, defines its limits”. He further explained the ideal of adult education: “adult education more accurately defined begins where vocational education leaves off. Its purpose is to put meaning into the whole of life”. He emphasized that the adult education should be built around the students’ needs and interests in different situations and it should consider the learners’ experiences as the education resources. This idea views that the adult education is part of living. Further more, the lifelong education concept was developed by the other scholars, such as Basil Yeaxlee (Smith, 1996), who first fully developed the idea of lifelong education. His work was drawn upon the work of Lindeman and others, and upon his own extensive experience within adult education in Britain. In this book Lifelong Education published in 1929, he further developed the idea of adult education into a much wider lifelong education. He agreed that education was part of living by writing “adult education, rightly interpreted, is as inseparable from normal living as food and physical exercise. Life, to be vivid, strong, and creative, demands constant reflection upon experience”. He also emphasized the importance of informal learning: “They (informal types of adult education) are the only recruiting ground for higher educational adventures on anything beyond the present small scale. But also they are the only ground wherein a very large number of people will ever find themselves at home at all.” In this book, the importance of lifelong learning should be recognized by all ages and backgrounds of learners. Based on Tight’s work in 1996, Smith(Smith, 1996) summarized three key features of lifelong education, including “First, lifelong education is seen as building upon and affecting all existing educational providers, including both schools and institutions of higher education... Second, it extends beyond the formal educational providers to encompass all agencies, groups and individuals involved in any kind of learning activity... Third, it rests on the belief that individuals are, or can become, self-directing, and that they will see the value in engaging in lifelong education.” However, the lifelong learning is more than adult education, which often emphasizes providing people with opportunities to engage in (school-like) learning activities during their adult life(Fischer, 2001). Lifelong education has been further extended to lifelong learning (Smith, 1996). One reason for the shift from “education” to “learning” is that “education” focuses on planned activities and “learning” can include both informal incident activities and formal educated activities(Merriam & Brockett, 1997). Field in his book Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order reported the fundamental shift in the behavior of ordinary citizens, and the ordinary citizens have increasingly regarded the day-to-day practice of adult learning as routine [Smith, 1996 #1]. Another reason for this shift is a growing interest on learning beyond the class room, which involves the shift of the learning unit from the
formal education institute to the learner as the central unit in the learning process. The purposes of lifelong learning are around the learners as nations, as institutions, and as individuals (Illeris, 2002). People need to have a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in lifelong learning. MOTIVATION IN LIFELONG LEARNING
The literature about lifelong learning clearly articulates the importance of the motivation of the lifelong learners(Illeris, 2002). McCombs (McCombs, 1991) stated in her article that the "motivated person is a lifelong learner, and the lifelong learner is a motivated person". The learners’ interests, needs, and motivations promote the learners to learn in their lives. McCombs (McCombs, 1991) suggested that the formal education environment should also promote the lifelong learning, as well as the formal education purposes. The schools should not simply provide education materials / contents for the students, but also focuses more on development of more diverse aspects of individuals such as their metacognitive and affective dimensions. She argued that the students who are motivated must: •
“see schooling and education as personally relevant to their interests and goals.
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believe that they possess the skills and competencies to successfully accomplish their goals
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see themselves as responsible agents in the definition and accomplishment of personal goals
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understand the higher level thinking and selfregulation skills that lead to goal attainment
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call into play processes for effectively and efficiently encoding, processing and recalling information
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control emotions and moods that can facilitate or interfere with learning and motivation, and
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produce the performance outcomes that signal successfully goal attainment”.
She further argued that, in order to teach students how to learn for the purpose of lifelong learning, the teachers need to focus on learning activities on more than simply course contents, helping students to understand learning processes, creating a learning atmosphere where students are responsible for their own learning, creating a learning atmosphere where students can foresee their success, and designing learning activities that are relevant to the students’ needs and interesting to the students. Cropley (Cropley, 1978) also addressed the importance of motivation in the lifelong learning in his work and discussed how to cultivate a systematic, goal oriented process of lifelong learning. He described some characteristics of successful lifelong learners similar to
those addressed by McCombs with additional skills. The learners need to have such skills: use of different learning strategies and learning in different settings, basic learning skills and basic “intellectual powers” such as critical thinking, and use of learning devices. He also discussed some teacher and student activities to support the development of the attitudes and skills needed for lifelong learning. Parkinson (Parkinson, 1999) discussed some ways in which the motivation attribute of lifelong learning can be developed. The strategies being adopted are based on several basic elements, including: •
communicating expectations: The institutions should clearly state the goal of lifelong learning.
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expecting students to take responsibility for their learning while at the university: providing learning opportunities outside the classroom so that;
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providing motivation for students so that the student can receive benefits of self-directed learning
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teaching students how to learn, such as how to learn through individual or group activities and how to manage the time.
The activities that support lifelong learning are illustrated in the Figure 1 by Parkinson (Parkinson, 1999).
Becoming a lifelong learner requires discipline a person to assume responsibility for his or her continued learning. The learner’s motivation drives the learner to learn in the lifelong learning. There are various learning forms of learning in the lifelong learning. The strongly motivation oriented activities in the lifelong learning lead many differences of the lifelong learning from the conventional formal learning. In this section, the new forms of learning in lifelong learning will be introduced first. Then, discussion of differences between the formal learning and lifelong learning will be followed then. New Forms of Learning in Lifelong Learning
From the literature introduced before, some new forms of learning that are emphasized in the lifelong learning are summarized in this section by referring to Fischer’s work (Fischer, 1999, 2001) (Table 1). Table 1. Overview of New Forms of Learning in Lifelong Learning (Fischer, 1999, 2001) Form
Compleme nt Form
Major Challenges
Selfdirected learning
Prescribed learning
Problem framing
Learning on demand
Learning on advance
Identifying the breakdown leading to the demand; integration of working and learning
Informal learning
Formal learning
Larger, purposive activities provide learning opportunities
Collaborati ve and organizatio nal learning
Individual learning
Shared understanding
Self-Directed Learning
Figure 1. Activities support lifelong learning (Parkinson, 1999) CHARACTERISTICS OF LIFELONG LEARNING
It is obvious that a desire for lifelong learning must come from inside the person. If a person chooses something without a desire, his/her other efforts may have little effect.
The self-directed learning is an important concept in the lifelong learning. In the self-directed lifelong learning, the learners are responsible owners and managers of their own learning process. Self-directed lifelong learning integrates self-management (contextual control over social setting, resources, and actions), self-monitoring (cognitive responsibilities on their learning strategies) and motivational dimensions (tasks) (Garrison, 1997). In the self-directed lifelong learning, the role of motivation and volition in initiating and maintaining learners' efforts is emphasized. Motivation drives the students to learn, and volition keeps the student with the will to see a task through to the end to achieve the goals (Garrison, 1997). In the self-directed lifelong learning, the control gradually shifts from teachers to learners. Learners need to learning activities independently in setting learning goals and
deciding what to learn and how to reach the goals. Teachers teach students how to learn gradually through visible activities. Teachers develop learning strategies by working with students together so students can develop the capabilities to do their own. Fischer (Fischer, 1999) argued that, for the schools to prepare the students for lifelong learning, an attempt may be needed to transform learning from an externally prescribed learning by the teachers to an internally directed learning by the students, and from learning derived from systematic branches of science to learning dependent on the contexts developed by the learners from their own needs. Learning on Demand
The information technologies play an increasingly important role in the current information age. Today’s people live in the information technology changing and updating environment. The rapid changing economy and society represents demands on today’s people on lifelong learning, which comes from the demands of people’s environments (Markkula, et al., 2000). McCan (McCann, 1995) summarized some characteristics of learning on demand as follows: •
“Distributed: Education must be self-directed and accessible on demand.
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Modular: In general, education packages address a single skill, in contrast to courses addressing multiple skills.
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Multisensory: Education stimulates sight, hearing, and touch in a variety of ways.
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Portable: Education is easily moved with the employee.
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Interruptible: The student can stop and start easily.
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Nonlinear: There is no fixed sequence of modules.
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Transferable: movement is easy across languages and cultures.
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Responsive: Development cycle is short.”
Fischer (Fischer, 1999) proposed the question “what is the role of “basic skills” during the learning on demand. He argued that the modern “basic skills” will change over time as the technologies rapidly change and the “old basic skills” are relevant for the duration of a human life. Informal Learning
Informal learning is a process to help people to learn outside of classrooms (Smith, 1997). Smith summarized different views on information learning. Some views it as learning in daily life. Some views it as learning projects in which we work ourselves. Some views it as “the learning that comes as part of being involved in youth and community organizations”. It is summarized in Smith (Smith, 1997) as: •
“works through, and is driven by, conversation;
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involves exploring and enlarging experience;
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can take place in any setting.”
Contrasting with the formal learning in schools, informal learning has a number of attributes missing from formal learning (Fischer, 1999), such as it often occurs in group activities rather than individual activities; the learner can decide the topic, time and place for learning; and activities can be done with flexible time and environment. Fischer recommended that the future formal educational institutions should value the information learning and cultivate it by creating environments for it. Collaborative and Organization Learning
Fischer (Fischer, 1999) discussed the limitation of individual human mind and pointed out that lifelong learning is often embedded in the social interaction process and “requires exploiting the social nature of human understanding and practices” (Fischer, 1999). Collaborative learning and organizational learning come form the learning theories of distributed cognition (Fischer, 1998). Individuals can learn through collaborating with others on a task and the collaboration outcome can be more than the outcome from multiple individual activities (Arias, et al., 2000). Various collaborators, such as students, teachers, and researchers, can learn during their collaboration process (Carroll, et al., 2001; Rosson, et al., 2002). In the organization learning, individuals learn through living in the organizations and participate in organization activities (Smith, 2001). A key step in organizational learning is to store knowledge in the organizational memory (Fischer, 1999). Fischer (Fischer, 1999) pointed out that “Organizational memory must be (1) extended and updated as it is used to support work practices, (2) continually reorganized to integrate new information and new concerns, and (3) serve work by making stored information relevant to the new task at hand. ” The challenge in such learning activities is to construct and maintain shared understanding among collaborators (Arias, et al., 2000; Carroll, et al., 2003). Comparison between Formal Learning and Lifelong Learning
Conventional education systems in schooling institutions are rooted in the behaviorist learning theory(Fischer, 1999), while the lifelong learning involves various learning theories. There are many differences between the conventional formal learning and lifelong. The following differences are summarized from Fischer’s work (Fischer, 1999) and others lifelong learning literature, such as Smith (Smith, 1997). •
Emphasis – Formal learning emphasizes the “basic skills”, exposure and access to prescribed materials, while lifelong learning emphasizes the learning embedded in ongoing practices and informal participation.
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Flexibility on time, place and context – The lifelong learning usually has more flexibility on the learner’s choosing the time, place, and situations for learning, especially for informal learning (Smith, 1997).
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Topics to be learned and problems to be solved – In formal learning, the topics to be learned often are pre-defined in the curricula, and the problems usually are given by the teachers to the students. However, in lifelong learning, the topics to be learned, especially for new topics, often come up from the ongoing work contexts incidentally and problems can be constructed by the students.
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Structure of learning – The structure for formal learning is pedagogic and that for lifelong learning is work activity, that is, the formal learning is structured and is done through formal educational systems, and the lifelong learning is unstructured and takes places in activities.
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Role of teachers –Teachers in formal learning often tell what they know about something to a passive learner. In lifelong learning, the teachers not only teach something to the students, and they also engage in the work practice and can learn something from the teaching activities, from the students. So, the model of relationship between the teacher and the student in formal learning can be modeled by an expert-novice model and that in lifelong learning is reciprocal.
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Teaching mode – Teachers in formal learning need to teach the students the knowledge and the knowledge is absorbed by the students, while students in lifelong learning construct the knowledge with the teachers together, rather than simply receive delivered knowledge from the teachers.
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Potential drawbacks – Potential drawbacks for the formal learning include that the learning is decontextualized and not situated, and it may not fit to all situations and all students. Those for lifelong learning include that the learning is not systematic and some important concepts may not be encountered by the learners in the learning process.
Fischer (Fischer, 1999) argued that to improve the formal learning, we need to contextualize and situate the formal educational institutions; the knowledge should be presented by teachers as “a human struggle” to understand toward the truth; the formal learning needs to cultivate and develop the skills and processes for lifelong learning and make the learner develop positive attitude for learning. MEASURING LIFELONG LEARNING
In conventional formal education systems, teachers is presented as a single, presumably omniscient person who
“explicitly tells or shows presumably unknowing learners something they presumably know nothing about” (Fischer, 1998). In such systems, the role of teachers or students usually is associated with a person, while that in the today’s world is only associated with specific contexts. So, there is a need to reform the conventional formal education toward lifelong education. Assessment has long been a challenge in such reform(Fischer, 1998). There have been some attempts to develop lifelong learning predictive instruments in some fields (Livneh, 1988; Livneh & Livneh, 1988, 1999). Livneh studied the assessment of lifelong learning in the field of human service professions. In order to create a profile of lifelong learning, she developed an instrument, Characteristics of Lifelong Learning in the Professions (CLLP)(Livneh, 1988). CLLP was used to predict continuing education potential in those same professions. The analysis results did not provide actual measured variance in lifelong learning enough to develop a usable profile of lifelong learning, but showed significant differences on the factors of “educability” and “future orientation” between low and high participants. In her 1999’s work (Livneh & Livneh, 1999), she extended CLLP to identify those skills and characteristics that successfully predict involvement in professional development among educators. The four extracted factors (including SelfMotivated Learning, Family Education background, Commitment to Professional Learning, and External Motivation) and a set of socio-demographic variables were analyzed by using multiple regression analysis to predict the amount of time spent by the respondents in learning activities during the previous year. The analysis results showed that two lifelong learning factors (Self-Motivated Learning and External Motivation) and one sociodemographic variable (Education Level) predicted onesixth of the variance devoted by respondents to professional learning activities. There are some other studies on evaluation of lifelong learning. For example, Oddi(Oddi, 1986, 1990; Six, 1989) developed the instrument Oddi Continuing Learning Inventory (OCLI) to evaluate measures of self-directed continuing learning behavior in adults. Another example is that Garst and Ried (Garst & Ried, 1999) studied how to evaluate the Education Participation Scale (EPS) in determining motivational orientations of nontraditional pharmacy doctoral students. CONCLUSION
Lifelong is critical and important in our lifespan. This paper gives a preliminary literature review on the studies of lifelong learning. The motivation in lifelong learning is regarded as the most important component in lifelong learning in this study. Due to the motivated nature of lifelong learning, it has four new forms of learning contributing to lifelong learning, which lead to many significant differences between lifelong learning and
formal learning. For the purpose of improving formal learning, there are some attempts to induce lifelong learning into formal learning and also some initial studies on assessment on lifelong learning. Currently, there are only limited preliminary studies that were done on inducing lifelong learning in formal education. The challenges on this problem include: How to develop the positive atmosphere for the learners to develop lifelong learning skills in formal learning environment? To what extent, the teachers should induce designed lifelong learning activities into the current formal education system? Although there are some initial studies on evaluation of lifelong learning activities, there are no very successful and complete studies on this problem. The challenge of this problem is to identify factors that influence the lifelong learning and design appropriate study approaches to collect and analyze the data. REFERENCES
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