When I saw my friend Lee last night, he told me “I looked at your blog the other day.” He’d seen it referenced in the signature line of an e-mail I sent him. He went on to say, ” I read three or four entries. Then I went back up and looked more closely at the title.” He told me that, for a minute there, he had real concerns about our sense of humor. Because he wasn’t seeing ANYTHING on this LOL blog that struck him as particularly funny.The conversation (which did make me Laugh Out Loud a little) also made me think about acronyms in general and how often they’re a source for misunderstanding. Do you check your learning materials to make sure the language used is commonly understood by your target audience? As a consultant, I have an advantage working with most clients when it comes to jargon and potentially confusing language. Terms that are likely to confuse listeners are likely to confuse me, too, prompting the question. Even that’s not foolproof, though, since it’s human nature to pick up on language and jargon pretty quickly.And it’s not as though we don’t have jargon, too. “The rule of difference” or “congruence” are terms that make perfect sense to me and my coworkers – because we talk about those principles a lot. When it comes to explaining to subject matter experts why we are making certain design choices in our courses, I have to explain what I mean by those and other learning terms.So, as with so much in learning (and in life), context is key. And clarity is more difficult to achieve than we sometimes think it will be.This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 8:12 am and is filed under LOL, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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