Despite the weather bureau's promise of snow, rain has been settling over Copenhagen for the past few days. The bitter cold contrasts with the steaming warmth inside, so I'm forever removing and replacing gloves, scarf and jacket.
From Thursday to Saturday there has been an interesting mix of presentations from organisational development through interventions to descriptions of learning rallies. All with the focus on developing competence - sometimes the workers, but more often the overall competence of large organisations. The majority of presenters were from the higher education sector, and a large number were PhD students presenting works in progress.
Summary (very brief) of my learning from the conference:
- Worker's identity are seen as being either in a struggle against the workplace domination, or expressed through emancipation into more challenging roles.
- That organisational theory was never far from the surface - where I would talk of education/training, presenters talked in terms of interventions.
- Many were concerned about transfer of school learning to the workplace, or continuance post-intervention.
Through my project this year I have been pondering how to capture informal learning. Some argued that it should not be formalised in this way, but rather 'valued'. Yet within the VET sector, we need evidence of competence, and informal learning would seem to be a key part of the process.
more to come...
Posted by Kirsty at November 29, 2004 06:30 AM