Study Of Adult Informal Learning In We Media

As an important form of lifelong learning, informal learning is as important as formal learning and non-formal learning, and it is the most common form to achieve the goal of learning society. Many researchers at home and abroad put huge interest and enthusiasm in informal learning, even domestic research appears to an ascendant tendency. Originated from the United States, informal learning research is branded by pragmatism since its rise, but its main concern is informal learning in the workplace, ignoring the informal learning in daily life. Integrating with or embedding into everyday life activities, informal learning stretches in everyday life. It meets the general daily learning needs of adults, has a fundamental function and possesses reproduction and transformation duality. Under the role of mass media, media technology tendency appears in modern daily life, besides, this tendency reshapes adults’informal learning through learning media’s conversion, making adults’ informal learning mainly depend on the dominant media in daily life. We media is a new media based on wed2.0 technology, and its flattening of information production, dissemination and occupation triggers the revolution of information communication which has great significance for adult informal learning and it is the field of adult informal learning.Based on the view and theoretical basis of culture study, my study treats we media as informal learning field and explores the characteristics and functions of informal learning by analyzing the characteristics of knowledge and meaning production, dissemination and occupation in we media through text analysis and interview. As for the specific research methods, firstly, it selects some microblog texts as sample according to the classification of certain period or topics in the sina microblogs four cases concerning. Then it analyzes the characteristics of knowledge and meaning, dissecting the explicit or hidden idea tendency in these microblogs. Secondly, it explores interviewees’ perceptions on how to use microblog and how to construct certain knowledge or meaning, which makes foundation for exploring we media’s functions and features. Since we media information includes both private and public aspects, my study discusses the features of informal learning oriented to private and public life.The study found that in we media, informal learning oriented to private life has characteristics of demand-orientation, contextualization generation, pragmatism and incidental generation; in the informal learning oriented to public, adults learn something through public discussions as "bystanders". And its characteristics include multi-authority orientation, discourse construction and schema construction based on decoding. Informal learning in we media includes these functions:(1) it can meets the demands of daily learning. These learning needs include:adults’ social roles to play in daily life; structured requirements to deal with in everyday life; demands focused on problem-solving and entertainment to meet; public events to comprehend. (2) To strengthen or reconstruct identity. It reinforces adults’ identity while information from we media can conform to the free or given identity in everyday life; it is also likely to lead people to reflect the free or given identity in everyday life, thus reconstructing adults’ identity. (3) Resistance or reform. The public construct their own sense of the world through informal learning in we media, by which to resist cultural hegemony, even to bring further transformative challenges to the existing social relations, social identity, and the knowledge and belief systems.