Online publishing and e-learning: divided by a common language?

Illustration: discussing apples and oranges What’s an LMS? Depends who you ask. If I’m talking to my online publishing friends it’s a Library Management System, but my e-learning friends think it’s something different altogether. Similar, but different. You can’t help noticing that people who work in closely related digital industries don’t seem to swap notes much before generating new TLA’s (that’s Three Letter Acronyms to you).

But that’s not the worst of it. In fact these two very similar groups of companies which do very similar things each has a completely different language, incomprehensible to the other community. And yet you sense a lot of common concepts and aspirations behind the jargon. Here’s a small compare-and-contrast exercise.

Online publishing	E-learning
LMS = Library Management System	LMS = Learning Management System
Widget = ‘see inside the book’	Widget = desktop access to LMS
Holy Grail = embed content in workflow	Holy Grail = embed learning in workflow
Contextual workspaces	EPSS = electronic performance support system
Cross-media	Blended learning
Information Architect	Instructional Designer
ROI	Kirkpatrick Level 5
Semantic Web	Web 3.0 (let’s not get hung up on semantics)
ALPSP = Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers	ALPs = Adult Learning plans
NBA = Net Book Agreement	NBA = National Basketball Association
Open Access	OER = Open Educational Resources
Disintermediation	Teacher, leave those kids alone