learning management


Love the way you lea(r)n A


Tim Gibson contemplates the degree of separation in some businesses between two words


10-minute browse through a couple of online etymological dictionaries gives the impression that, although they have been knocking about since Anglo-Saxon times, the two words ‘learn’ and ‘lean’ have come to us via rather different paths.


‘Lean’ is an adjective that appears to have come from the word ‘hlaene’,


meaning ‘thin, spare, with little fat’. ‘Learn’, on the other hand, is a verb that looks as if it could be descended from ‘leornan’, meaning to ‘get knowledge, to be cultivated’. However, somewhere along the journey to the present day ‘leornan’ met the word ‘leis’, meaning ‘(follow or find the) track’. Weirdly, ‘leornan’ and ‘leis’ could even have had a chat along the way with the word ‘laest’, meaning ‘sole of the foot’. This sparked the thought that although I’ve


probably done most of my learning to date sitting down – listening, talking, reading, writing – often the most enjoyable learning has happened in the doing, when I’m quite literally on my feet. What about you? If it is a coincidence at all, then it’s certainly a happy one that ‘learn’ and ‘lean’


have become so like one another, separated by only one letter. Sadly, though, the separation would seem to be far greater in many businesses, which is a shame because the two share so many similarities and have so much to say to one another. Just for a second, let’s use some brackets to morph the two into one to


explore some obvious similarities:  Lea(r)ning, when viewed as a means to an end, often has performance improvement as one of its desired outcomes.


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e.learning age may 2012


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