> I am put out by the description of non accredited
learning as "infotainment "- a very perjorative
description of a vital activity in many peoples
lives.<

Yes, I agree.

I'm a secondary school teacher approaching retirement.
Earlier in my career I did part-time postgraduate
courses leading to the award of an MA in German and an
MEd in comparative education. I got a lot of personal
satisfaction from these courses, but I can confidently
say, with hindsight, that they had little or no impact
on my career development.

My brother, who has a PhD in computer science,
dissuaded me from taking yet more higher degrees and
to present at conferences instead. This gave me
greater independence and enabled me to combine my love
of research and travel. At this stage in my teaching
career, the mid-1990s, I had just moved from modern
foreign languages (MFL) into special educational needs
(SEN). Coincidentally, I noticed that there was
something of a hiatus in research on teaching MFL to
those with SEN, so that became the niche I decided to
explore. Now I've presented at conferences in Hungary,
Canada and Japan, written articles, delivered
workshops and contributed to a recent European Union
report. So non-accredited learning, in my case, has
proved much more fertile ground than my earlier,
formal accredited learning ever has.

There is definitely a place for accredited learning.
One of my retirement plans is to learn Spanish, which
I expect would be done at an evening class leading to
some kind of academic qualification. The latter is
incidental, though, to my main purpose, which is to
keep my brain active - learning a foreign language is
a well recognised way of doing so - and to enable me
to read online and printed documents in Spanish to
further my MFL/SEN research interests. I don't want to
return to the artificial deadlines imposed by
accredited learning, however, or to the sitting in
classrooms alongside weary colleagues. I don't need to
have a postgraduate qualification dangling like a
carrot in front of me when I have the alternative of
speaking at an international conference or writing an
article for a learned journal. It's a sobering thought
to remember that the record holder of the largest
number of university degrees is probably the present
incumbent of the Zimbabwean presidency.

David Wilson
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/