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The accelerating change that the society is experiencing worldwide is exposing the weaknesses in the éducation system we have inherited from previous generations. Every year lots of kinds of jobs disappear and new job descriptions are being created as well. Lifelong learning is no longer a theoretical concept, but a very real need for most people. Not all learning comes from formal education processes. Students and professionals are getting actionable knowledge from all kinds of sources and activities. Thus, informal learning, alongside competence-based learning and learning outcomes is getting a lot of attention lately from human resources departments, academies and policy makers. A number of countries and organizations arc busy defining guidelines for validating and evaluating informal learning experiences and formalizing its outcomes. In a globalized society where technology has brought together different cultures and educational systems, managing to keep track of a learner's competences is a daunting task, and especially when trying to take into account the competences acquired through informal means. In this paper, we propose a framework to gather, enhance, organize, evaluate and showcase a user's informal learning using a social approach to engage the learners to use the system by providing valuable recommendations, contacts and feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lifelong Learning has been a growing interest in e-learning research communities, in a similar way as other related kinds of learning (formal, non-formal and informal) already had. In fact, the Tagging Recognition and Acknowledgment of Informal Learning Experiences project proposes a framework to manage these types of learning, giving special attention to informal learning. This project gathers informal learning activities with an Informal Learning Collector. The main way for registering informal learning activities data into the Informal Learning Collector is using push mechanisms where the user explicitly introduces such information. In this paper, we present some evaluation of user opinions about this push communication mechanism, and propose an alternative way to communicate informal learning activities data, by using a pull mechanism. Using the pull mechanism, the Informal Learning Collector collects data directly from external applications. After the introduction of the pull mechanism, Informal Learning Collector users have confirmed that usability has been improved significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal learning has been a global hot topic for the past several years. The growth of the internet and the pervasiveness of computers in everyday life means that a huge part of this informal learning is done through a computer. In the European Union, since the official recognition of informal learning in 1999 with the Bologna Treaty, a number of guidelines and proposals have been published providing techniques and recommendations for translating informal learning outcomes to formal competences. Most of these guidelines depend on an evaluator (internal or external) to oversee and certify the process. In our work, we propose the usage of a more social and dynamic framework for gathering, validating and promoting a learner's digital informal learning. This framework is based primarily on peer interaction and peer assessment instead of employing experts and provides mechanisms for personalized recommendations in order to introduce further informal learning opportunities to the learners. We propose an approach where a learner's evaluation happens organically while other learners adopt the same activities and evaluate them positively or negatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]