This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network (ECN).

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

Who is studying for the EMCISA?

Byte posted a nice wrap-up of study resources. I’ve decided to take this exam before the end of the year, I’ll be blogging about my experience. Stay tuned for details!

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• VMWare
  • Chad Sakac posted the slides and recording from this week’s Atlanta VMUG – they talked about storage and VMware best practices.
  • Great posts from Proven Professional TechHead this week…PPT and visio VMWare images, and vChat 11 covered vSphere questions and free tools.
  • Gregg’s blog (EMC CONSULTING) has the breakdown of what it was like to sit in the VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security Course.
• Cloud
  • Virtual Winfrastructure has a post about their new white paper about virtualizing Exchange on Hyper-V
• Chuck Hollis talks about EMC’s Isilon acquisition
• Chuck also talks about PowerPath <— if you are new to PowerPath or if you are starting to virtualize your servers, you should check out this article!
• Proven Professional Steve Todd talks about designing an IT infrastructure that can support innovative applications...things like embedding smart chips in running shoes.

What were you up to this week?

In the US we’re getting ready for a holiday next week…will any of you be studying?

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

This post is cross-posted from the Proven Professional Community on ECN.

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

New Proven Professional Spotlight

Each month we’ll be highlighting a new Proven Professional. This month the spotlight is on Paul Brant. He was the 1st place winner in the Knowledge Sharing Contest this year. His paper is entitled Above the Clouds – Best Practices in Creating a Sustainable  Computing Infrastructre to Achieve Business Value & Growth. Go read more about Paul and find links to his winning paper here.

Impact of having the Proven Professional certification

There were a couple of active this threads where people shared what they see as the impact of their Proven Professional certification (see this thread or this thread).

Have you recently passed one of the Proven Professional certification exams? What are your next steps? Share them with everyone, your story may encourage someone else!

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

MichWa’s Storage Networking Blog is written by one of the people who writes the SAN classes for EMC. Right now he’s blogging about updating the SAN troubleshooting class.

Training Techies is written by one of the people who writes Documentum training. Her latest post was about deep dive training, in particular a course on Documentum data model design.

Ad-Hoc Education is written by the guy that runs University Relations for EMC in Russia. You’ll need to have a bablefish for this blog, but he highlights the work many of our Academic Alliance students are doing over in that part of the world.

What were you up to this week?

Share your week with us…were you studying? Taking a break from technology to enjoy the weather? Building out a new environment?

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

This question “what IS informal learning?” came up in a meeting the other day. The answer that was given was interesting – but it focused on educational technology. Today’s post will attempt to define informal, and in another post I’ll tackle some technologies that can be used to enhance informal learning.

First, a textbook definition:

a type of education or training program in which learners define what they want to learn and learning is considered successful when learners feel that they are able to master their intended objectives (whether or not the course designers believe that the learners have or have not demonstrated mastery) [Carliner, 2004] (all emphasis mine).

Driscoll, M., & Carliner, S. (2005). Advanced Web-Based Training Strategies: Unlocking Instructionally Sound Online Learning (p. 118). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

If I think about how I learn, I use a mix of formal and informal learning methods. I am in grad school, so obviously that is formal learning. There is a curriculum, there are classes with learning objectives that have been set by the instructor, there are activities I must complete successfully in order to get credit for the class. It has been decided for me what I will learn, how I will learn it, and how I will prove that I have mastered that topic.

But here’s the problem: I don’t always learn in the way the instructors have decided I should learn. I have to set up my own personal learning environment to augment what the course designer created. My PLE includes talking to other experts, reading blogs, googling, tweeting for help, and blogging.

Additionally, I don’t stop learning about that topic once the semester is over. I continue to use my informal methods to expand what I learned during class.

And that is just my graduate work. I’m a techie, and I write technical training for other techies. There is so much informal learning that goes on in the technical world, mostly because our field changes so rapidly! For instance, I am working on sharing a VMware virtual machine with some students, and I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get the job done. I googled. I asked for help on Twitter. I consulted with other experts in my department. I just try different options. (I’m leaving out lots of detail here, there are some underlying issues making this a very complex problem).

I can tell you, it has taken me all week to get to the point where I have one or two solid options to solve my vm problem. This is partially due to the way I learn – I am easily distracted with shiny, interesting, technical things. Sometimes I don’t realize my search for answers has gone off topic until I have been playing with the shiny new idea for an hour or so.

I can also tell you that I wouldn’t have the means to do an intelligent search for information to solve my problem if I didn’t have the base technical knowledge I’ve received from formal learning. That formal learning came from my undergraduate education and technical classes I’ve attended. The designed, focused attention to specific learning objectives have helped me build a strong technical foundation. That foundation is what enables me to understand how to informally search for information to solve my complex technical problem.

I’m left with more questions than answers:

• Can informal learning be loosely designed to augment formal learning?
  Jay Cross believes that it can – he says informal does not mean unintentional
• Can formal learning be designed to facilitate learner creation of PLEs which in turn will enhance informal learning?
• Isn’t it important to help facilitate informal learning so learners continue to learn even after they have attended a class?

After I wrote my last post about my eLearning course, I started thinking about Learning Environments (LEs). I made concept maps for both of my classes that include the designed LE as well as the personal learning environment (PLE) I’ve created to make sense of the courses. My PLE starts with the LE, and then I add the components I need for an effective learning environment.

Here’s the c-map for the eLearning course:

I’d say this is a behavorist-styled designed learning environment

Here’s the c-map from my Inquiry and Measurement course:

I’d say this is a constructivist design.

To be fair, I created a concept map of how one of the courses I am working on has been designed. I have to design courses based on the method my department dictates.

I think we do a good job of creating a real-world environment with our labs. That’s pretty important for technical training. But as I look at how I’ve designed this course, I can’t help but think how our students must augment our designed LE to create a PLE that facilitates their learning. In particular:

• Could we design the LE to more closely match some of the common PLE components our students have?
• Do different audiences have different PLEs?
• How can you capture this information?