It's time to drop e-learning: "It’s time to drop e-learning. Let’s be specific. It’s time to drop the ‘e’ in e-learning.
It’s time to recognise that the ‘e’ carries the stigma of past hyperbole, puts some potential learners and managers off and smacks of a love of technology that has everything to do with content delivery, rather than individual learning."
Yeah, ok, and whatever. Language is power. Language is familiarity. Playing word-games (providing new terms, new definitions, and adding/dropping letters) has more to do with staking a personal claim in a field than it does about pursuing clarity. So we drop the "e" in "elearning". Then what? Well, we have distributed, blended, mobile, distance, informal, personal, (and on and on) learning. The terms of common use have the greatest value. While elearning has lost meaning, it means more to teachers, trainers, managers, and educators than any other term. Mind you, five years from now, we'll be advocating dropping informal, distributed, and blended learning in favor of just learning. What fun we can have with words.
The people who want to drop the 'e' and replace it with just learning are the people who are doing just learning.
Posted by: Stephen Downes at July 16, 2007 4:12 PM(: if you look at it like a branch structure e-learning roots out from learning. still, it is different - the faster and more efficient version of it (: at least that's what i think. e-learning is a new family-tree of "learning" situated in the parent category called "learning"
Posted by: denitza at July 17, 2007 9:17 AMGeorge,
yes spot on! I have heard this so many times as if it is something very profound. It helps me as a practitioner to talk about e-learning, because, yes it is a subset of learning, but it also has some distinct characteristics, challenges, opportunities. After all we don't talk about dropping 'global', 'local', 'green', 'left' or 'right' from 'politics' and say 'it's all just politics'. The categorizations (although always imperfect), help.
Martin
Hi George
Thanks for the reference to the article. Unfortunately I don’t think that your commentators have quite got its full gist. It certainly isn’t about word games, and I’m not saying that the term e-learning has lost meaning. Among practitioners it is a very useful word that encapsulates a great deal. For the rest of the world the meaning is often negative. The result: we have people deploying e-learning in their organisations who use the term in their department, but avoid it when talking to the people who sign the cheques. Check out the comments at the bottom of the article for an example from Karyn Romeis.
Don
Posted by: DonaldHTaylor at July 20, 2007 4:36 AMHi Donald...calls to drop "e" from elearning are getting more common (just read one on the blackboard blog: http://www.educateinnovate.com/blackboard/2007/07/dropping-the-e-.html ). Jay Cross has been advocating this for quite a while. Now, setting aside that my site is called "elearnspace" and that I may have a bias :), I find the elearning space too confusing for newcomers. We have so many different terms that are not clearly defined. While you don't state that elearning has lost meaning, you do state that elearning has acquired meaning that doesn't serve it well. I agree with this. But what is the solution or alternative? Simply using "learning" fails to address the range of approaches. Now I see blended learning as the term of choice (at least in academic environments). Perhaps, to paraphrase Churchill, elearning is the worst term to describe what we do...except for all the other terms.
Take care
George