This is my way of catching up on the A-Z challenge.  Not sure it’s legit, but whatever.

I’m currently taking two education online courses, both of which are Excellent.  But that’s not the E on my mind.  I am feeling Jaded at times because J stands for gallons of Jargon oozing through the discussion forums (and I’m not innocent either!).  The Highlight of the courses is learning cool ideas to improve my teaching, but I don’t approve of Hijacking familiar terms and reworking their use.

One example of Hijacking is “affordances of technology,”  which was originally coined by psychologist Ian Hutchby “as a reaction against social constructivism. ”  Yeah, I thought so.

An example of Jargon-creation is arbitrarily changing the definitions of words, such as this new one for abstraction: “Removing extraneous/irrelevant details from a problem to define the elements of a solution that are consistent.”

If you are still with me, can I hear a “HuH?”   On the other hand, folks got to make a living, right?  So is this what it means to be a 21st century learner?