What's In a Name?

What's In a Name?
It seems like an eon ago that Jay Cross declared e-learning dead, but it was only a couple of months. Kevin Kruse responds to this claim in his July column, arguing that it really depends on how you define e-learning. "If we use a broad definition, we can see the many successes of e-learning and even see how it has permeated our everyday lives." I really like his example: "I turned to my laptop and searched for 'bears nocturnal' on Google, and in a 10th of a second I received 20,500 pages of information. Of course, it only took the first page to let me know that bears are mostly nocturnal (it depends on the season and how hungry the bears are). Was this e-learning? By most definitions, no. There was no support, community, multimedia, tracking or structured ISD process. Were digital technologies involved? Yes. Did my daughter and I learn something? Yes again. To me, that makes it an e-learning experience." This, to me, not merely counts as e-learning, it is definitive of e-learning. More...