Dropping the 'e'

Look above at the title of this blog. Yep... Learning with 'e's. The 'e' seems to be in front of just about everything now. Not just e-mail, but also e-commerce, e-tickets and of course e-learning. Someone pointed out to me recently that if vetrinary surgeons went 'e' then it would be my name backwards - e-vets. On it goes.

The 'e' used to stand for 'electronic', but now that such practices have been so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness here in the Western Industrialised world, there is debate about whether the 'e' should be dropped. Well, if we drop the 'e' from e-learning, that signifies that all forms of learning are essentially the same, whether they are mediated through technology or not, and I suppose that is the main idea behind the argument to drop then 'e'. But the argument then moves to whether we should also drop the 'e' in e-mail. Is mail correspondence sufficiently coalesced that e-mail is now blended with traditional mail? Or are the two still distinctly different? I get as much junk mail as I do electronic spam.

So if we keep the 'e' in e-learning (which I suspect we will, because we are all used to it now) what should the 'e' represent, at least conceptually? Should it represent 'enhanced' learning perhaps? Or is there scope to see the 'e' as 'extended' learning? Some might see the 'e' in e-learning as representative of 'exotic' forms of learning if they are learning in technology poor environments. For the cynics perhaps, the 'e' in e-learning would probably stand for 'expensive', because whatever we do with e-learning, it doesn't come cheap in terms of equipment costs, and time spend developing, learning how to use it and replacing it when it goes wrong.

What are your views on the 'e' in e-learning? Should it be dropped, and if so, will it make a difference one way or another? If we keep it, should it still represent 'electronic'? Or should it really stand for something else, some other emerging properties of technology enhanced learning? I think you're itching to have your say in the comments box below...

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