Dr. Ronald Paige

Walden University's 2007 Harold L. Hodgkinson Award was presented to Dr. Ronald Paige, a Ph.D. in Education graduate, for his dissertation, The Relationship Between Self-Directed Informal Learning and the Career Development Process.

Paige, the director of instructional technology at Cleveland State Community College in Cleveland, Tenn., wanted to investigate how people self-direct their own informal (day-to-day) learning and how this informal learning affects their career development.

Dissertation Inspiration
Paige says he got the idea for his dissertation over the course of 30 years—inspired by his own diverse career development.

“I have had many successful careers, including ad sales and writing and producing commercials and infomercials. I had the first one-hour photo processing lab in Western New York, owned a successful vegetarian restaurant, produced a radio show, published a regional magazine and was a secondary school teacher in several subject areas. Most of these fields I had no formal training in,” he says.

“I wondered: ‘How does a person succeed in a career without formal training?’ I did because I was able to direct my own learning. As an educator, I wanted to know what skills were necessary to successfully do this, and there was very little research on the topic. Self-directed informal learning is the Rodney Dangerfield of education.”

Research Process
For his own research, Paige conducted extensive interviews with technology users in various careers with different levels of education—ranging from a high school diploma or GED to a master’s degree and above.

He determined, through the interviewees’ open-ended career-development narratives, that self-directed informal learning is a fundamentally entrepreneurial activity.

“In the same way that an entrepreneur is one who organizes, manages and assumes the risk of the business enterprise, a learner is one who organizes, manages and assumes the risk of the enterprise of learning,” Paige says.

Importantly, the study also determined that without appropriate strategic guidance, self-directed informal learning led as easily to inefficient and ineffective learning choices as to successful ones.

“An example of an ineffective learning choice would be finding an effective learning strategy and using it over and over—but never trying anything new, which could be even better,” Paige says.

For instance, one interviewee who worked in computers got all of his knowledge from books—manuals. “This learning strategy worked, but he read each book cover to cover, which was a slow process and kept him behind. He didn’t get his information online because he’d had negative experiences in online communities,” Paige says.

Another key to benefiting most from self-directed informal learning is finding a “teacher” or individual who has experience in your field or area of interest and can show you the best way to employ the learning strategies.

“They can provide strategic guidance because they’ve been there,” says Paige. “They can show you that there’s not just one right answer, but rather help you visualize an outcome and show you multiple ways to reach it.”

Paige’s dissertation committee consisted of Dr. Linda Crawford (chair), who received the Bernard L. Turner Award; Dr. Mary Dereshiwsky; Dr. Bernice Folz; and Dr. Henry Merrill.

About the Award
Read more about the Harold L. Hodgkinson Award and past recipients.

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