Understanding Informal Group Learning in Online Communities Through Discourse Analysis

Since informal learning occurs outside of formal learning environments, describing informal learning and how it takes place can be a challenge for researchers. Past studies have typically oriented to informal learning as an individual, reflective process that can best be understood through the learners’ retrospective accounts about their experiences. Although reports on the individual lived experience represent the privileged way of understanding social reality (including informal learning), the linguistic/discursive turn of the 1980s proposed a shift in our view of the function of language as creating rather than representing versions of the world. Accordingly, we propose resituating informal learning from a reflective process occurring in an individual mind to the meaning making that occurs in group conversations. We present an exploratory analysis of a single thread from an online hiking community to introduce discourse analysis as a framework to study informal learning as a group meaning-making process.