Learning, not so far from teaching

Retrieved from the TEL opinion blog, November the 18th, 2006
 

We have all experienced difficulties in translating our papers and talks into English, and some of our English colleagues have taken up the same challenge when preparing their communication in an other language. The difficulty is classical: translation is not a mere transduction, words from two different languages rarely match: beyond the definition there is the connotations induced by the context or shaped by the history and the culture. This is not only a problem when translating our papers and talks, it is also a problem when establishing an ontology or metadata from an international perspective. This is especially a problem for research on TEL because most of our work does not develop in a formalised framework: the meaning of our words is not stable or fixed, even for recent neologism like e-learning (or elearning, or eLearning…).

I take here a first example from among all the problems we had to solve with Lucile Vadcard and few Kaleidoscope colleagues when building the metadata for the description of the documents to be uploaded on the TeLearn open archive that Kaleidoscope recently launched. This first example is “learning”. Indeed, “learning” is a word which is at the core of our discourse, and essential to any of our theoretical or practical activities. Here are a few of the expressions one could consider, they are taken from what is often proposed as keywords by conferences or journals: collaborative learning, ambient learning environment, learning environment, augmented learning environment, blended learning, distance learning, learning object, learning grid, situated learning, tangible learning, etc. When translating in French, it is clear that a “learning environment” is not “un environnement qui apprend” but “un environnement pour apprendre”, or to make it provocative: “un environnement qui enseigne”. This is more evident with the expression “blended learning” which is difficult to translate in a simple manner, it could mean “apprentissage mixte” (as suggested by Wikipedia) but this misses that eventually it refer to a teaching strategy which makes the best benefit of different possibilities, either digital or not, to stimulate and support learning. Again, we see that there is some “teaching” in the meaning of “learning”. It is very likely that the source of our difficulty is there. It is possibly why some of our colleagues decided not to define the expression “mobile learning ”!

Invited to participate in the workshop eAgenda, I had to consider the question: “can we introduce learning in every human activity?” One may understand now why, at first, this question embarrassed me. To elaborate a comment, I thought interesting to come back to the origin of “learning” and “teaching” in the English language. Both English words, “learning” and “teaching”,  has a German origin, tracing back respectively to "læran ” and “tæcan ” in Old English. While the latter meant “to show” or “to persuade”, the former was preferred to mean “to teach” or “to guide”. Then, could we suggest that the English word learning has a teaching connotation, and that as a result the meaning of  the question is: “can we introduce læran in every human activity?” In other words: can we empower every environment with “teaching” capabilities.

Indeed, such a discussion goes beyond a problem of translation. It raises the problem of understanding what is our field about. In my opinion, it is about “technology for human learning.” In this expression “learning” point more specifically the human epistemological challenge, passing to the small word “for” the burden of the teaching connotation. Moreover, it translate well in French: “technologies pour l’apprentissage humain”!

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