Lifelong learning is the key to success. I’ve said this before and I truly believe it. I believe that lifelong learning is the best approach to being successful in life or in anything that you want to pursue. Having an open mindset, a thirst for learning and knowledge, and the desire to share with others will put you in the position to identify inspiring opportunities. It positions you to capture life’s opportunities and to be able to excel in your chosen field.
Lifelong learning is both a formal and an informal process. Informally, you learn from all of your experiences, mistakes, lessons, and relationships and from the people around you. The informal learning process is about continuously improving at all areas of life. It’s about the desire to improve and not about being perfect. Formal learning is the process of intentional learning. You strive to learn new things that will help you achieve your personal professional or pleasure goals. Learning new things in one area will often help to give you new perspectives and ideas that can help in other areas of your life. Formal learning can be self-study learning, experiential learning, e-learning, classroom learning or a mix. There can also be a combination of formal and informal learning.
Technology is playing an increasingly important and powerful role in lifelong learning, just as it is in every area of life. Lifelong learning technology has the potential to change the way we learn and to bring lifelong learning to more people in ways that was not possible before. The two biggest technologies driving this are the Internet and mobile. They are now at the point that they’re readily and inexpensively available to everyone at a level of capability that is truly changing how we do things. It’s the ease and accessibility of information whenever and wherever and the ability to easily collaborate with large and diverse groups on a specific topic that are enabling the expansion and adoption of e-learning.
The most important aspect of lifelong learning technology that drives these new possibilities is the ability to share and collaborate about topics of interest with your learning community in a safe and secure environment. A big part of this are all the web 2.0 tools for discovering, sharing, learning, and collaborating. People can develop their own personal learning network to help discover things of interest and learn more about them, but the real power of lifelong learning technology is through the learning and sharing with your learning community. This takes learning to a different level, one not possible on your own. You will gain the most by collaborating with a group that is willing to share what they know and that shares your common interests. An individual can only do so much on their own, an individual needs support and assistance of a community to develop the desire and motivation, to understand what works and what doesn’t work and to act as a support system.
There are many important technologies that have a role in driving lifelong learning technology including the mobile internet, smartphones, cloud computing, big data, app development, online video and others. An increasingly important area facilitating the secure access to data and the ability to share and collaborate with others is identity management.
The need for identity management is ever-increasing with the proliferation of devices and media and the explosion of cloud resources for processing, storage, apps and analytics. You must feel safe and secure to be able to perform online actions in a productive, effective and an empowering way.
Are you frustrated with having to remember all of your multitudes of passwords? Do you reuse the same password over and over? Do you believe that your online accounts are as safe as they could be? Do you do online banking with confidence in the security of your online transactions? This is the domain of identity management. Identity management enables the free, safe and secure sharing of information in learning environments that fosters the power and potential of lifelong learning.
Identity management is a current area of focus of mine and will be the topic of my next blog post.
Life Well Learned 