Tomayto, Tomahto – eLearning, E-Learning
January 30, 2008
eLearning, E-Learning, ELearning, e-learning, e-Learning, elearning (did I miss any?) – when will we all come to a consensus? We need a First Council of Nicaea for eLearning where we vote once and for all on a spelling we can all live with. Trying to load a page with the appropriate keywords for the search engine crawlers is a royal pain. And I can’t even seem to stay consistent in my own writing.
Jay Cross thought the term, regardless of how you spell it, had picked up too much bad baggage and had become dated. And that was in 2002!
I agree with Jay that we’ve probably permanently damaged the brand due to many years of horrible eLearning (which, sadly, continues today), but let’s face it, the term itself is probably here to stay. Do you think the word email is going to go away anytime soon?
Speaking of which, many used to call it e-mail. And some still do (dinosaurs!). Drat, so much for finding a solution in precedent.
And what would work better anyway? Learning 2.0? Ugh.
Learning in the electronic age is becoming so hard to define.
Or why try labeling 21st century learning at all when you can just take the scattergun approach? The department I work in is officially called Learning & Education. I’m not kidding. Talk about covering all your bases.
We’re directly under the Department of Redundancy Department on the corporate org chart.
But I digress. Since Jay was allegedly the first to use it on the Web, I’m going with eLearning. No hyphen = faster to type. Small e + large L = a little bit of flair. Makes for nicer logos.
You say tomayto, I’ll say tomahto. Until the Council gathers, anyway.
Addendum: apparently I’m not alone in my confusion. The eLearning Guild spells it e-Learning exclusively on their website, despite their brand name. And why does the eLearning Guild use the term eBooks and not e-Books when they use e-Learning and not eLearning?
Oh, the chaos…
Posted in Evangelism
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March 5th, 2008 at 6:05 am
I’ve spent many sleepless nights on this one awakening in the small hours screaming “A hyphen, a hyphen my kingdom for a hyphen”.
If only for
lazinesssimplicity’s sake I prefer elearning. I if you add up all the hours spent typing those hyphens over a lifetime its a criminal waste.I think the lack of hyphen is much more prevalent generally – we don’t have i-phone, i-pod etc). A lot of java/javascript related things start with a j but forgoe the hyphen (jboss, jquery, etc). Same with xml (xquery, xpath etc.)
- Eamon
March 5th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Agreed, Eamon. In addition to unnecessary hyphens, if only we could eliminate worthless and arbitrary decals on new products (the removal of which has cost me far too many hours sweating with a rag and a can of WD-40), world productivity would rise at least, oh, say 10%.
August 16th, 2010 at 4:11 am
I’m with Jay. E-Learning, however you spell it, seems to conjure up nightmares for most Training Managers. It has attracted way too mcuh bad press (gleefully cheered on by the purveyors if ILT, sho started the rumours in the first place
). Let’s just call learning, learning.