You are responsible for your education
Many have said it before, and I’ll repeat it once more; as a developer you, yourself are the main responsible person for your own education. So not your employer, your mentors or anybody else. You are. This is one of the principles that is central to the software craftsmanship ideas.
So now we got that out of the way lets look at a particular way that I find very effective.
Software Conferences.
Software conferences offer the unique opportunity to first of all listen to some great people in the software industry talk about the topics that they are passionate about. Secondly you can have great discussion with the speakers, get more details about the topics that interested you.
I think that this might be the best way of introducing new ideas, you won’t know all the ins and outs, but you will know enough to determine whether or not to continue investigating them.
But
Lets go back to that it is your responsibility to educate yourself; so you want to go to one of these great conferences like for example; QCon, NDC or Øredev. These conferences are very focused on software craftsmanship and learning, but when I look at the costs of these conferences then I realize that it is almost not possible to be responsible for going to these events yourself. It is easy to spend 1.500 to 2.000 Euro on a three day conference including travel and hotel.
So these big conferences are really targeting companies, and they don’t really consider that there are many developers that cannot go because their employer is not willing to pay for their education.
Now I completely realize that having these conferences costs a lot of money, and also that if they would give some sort of discount for developers that pay their own ticket it would be misused by more then a few companies.
But honestly paying the 1.005 GBP for the QCon London event does hurt my wallet, I hope it is worth it 
Please note that this post has been tagged as a rant, but I hope it was an ok rant.
@Ade
This year will be my first QCon attendance, but what I have seen online I didn’t find them to be lecturing, also last year at NDC I felt the same way. But I would agree that I find the time after the presentations and in the evenings the most interesting parts of going to conferences as then I get to talk to a huge amount of interesting people. This is the same for when we invite someone to speak at our local user group. I assume that the smaller conferences give the same experience. Btw I hope to attend the Software Craftsmanship conference in the UK this year as well.
@Handy
You miss a whole lot of interaction, this is the most valuable part of a conference for me.
Great post! I’ve been on the other side of this issue and blamed the company I worked for, for not helping train/educate me. That was a very rough experience and I vowed NEVER to be lacking in training ever again! “So having got that out of the way,” :> I have a couple of cost effective means to help out people like us.
Free (and usually local) Code Camps. The whole premise of Code Camps is they are free to all, and you can usually get some great local presence at these things. No, you’re not getting TOP notch, Tony Robbins, Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer presentations, but you will hear from passionate, enthusiastic local developers!
Technical community groups (like the ODNC in Ottawa, ON, CA) is a great model. They also sometimes have study groups to help people even further their training with helping them achieve there MCTS (or higher) certifications. And those are usually VERY cost effective too!
Another way is to start your own blog! Yup, it might not be as popular as this blog you’re reading now (you’re here after all right? :>), but the act of writting up something FORCES you to learn more about it. It’s an amazing trick to get you to learn more about a topic!
Other ways are keeping on top of RSS Feeds. New to RSS, start checking it out NOW! Jason Haley’s Interesting Finds is a FANTASTIC place to start IMHO. He scours the web looking for interesting articles/blogs. This gives you a fantastic leg up on cherry picking the best sites to learn from.
PHEW! That’s a lot I think. Good luck to you, I need to get back to my own learning! Kudos on this post!