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Polsani's accidental intervention in my lived experience triggered a variety of activities and selfdirectedlearning opportunities, many of which are written up in chapters 3, 4 and 5 andespecially in appendices 1 and 4. As appendix 1 shows, I began to experiment with his ideaswhilst still at the conference in order that I would be ready to apply them in new professionalcontexts on arrival back at work.NewPostulation of the phenomenon ‘new’ derives from my observation that human beings becomeconfident and competent technologically when they are able to apply new knowledge andunderstanding in a different context or setting. In essence this is how the competing coreapplications software Microsoft Office and Macintosh iLife programs work. ‘I’ know that and stores my work in Microsoft Word so that when I meet the same commandsin Microsoft Excel, I have instant understanding of what I am supposed to do to protect mycontent. ‘I’ may learn to use one virtual learning environment which is providing technologicalsupport in one educational setting, but if I have confidence and competence with it, even if Imove to another software client used in a different educational setting, I may have onlymomentary loss of operational effectiveness. The concept of ‘transferable skills’ is predicatedon this notion of the utility of knowledge in ubiquitous settings. So, for a professional learner,the success of an informal learning episode with technology is likely to be the ability to do thesame thing in another context. The literary origins of this phenomenon are attributable to Bloom(1954) and Kolb (2005), both of whom have had an enduring impact on teachers' professionallearning programmes. Their schemas are frequently referenced by those seeking to make thepoint that learning that remains in the head and is not rolled out in practice will wither andatrophy. This is explored further in sections 2.5 and 2.6.81Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)