eBlog by Tore Hoel

The National Secretariat for the standardisation of learning technologies, shortened to NSSL, has just been kicked off this week. We were invited to come forward with our expectations to the new body. The representative for the Ministry of Education and Research (in Norwegian “the Ministry of Knowledge” - a name that sounds the orwellian bells of the Ministry of Truth, btw, the last meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 was held next to the building in London that inspired the concept and novel?) - Øystein Johannessen - made a very strong point of the need to escape from the “Hell of acronyms”, being overwhelmed by the four letter lingo of the standards community.

This sunk in, and the leader of the NSSL, Ola Berge, made this point of “explaining standards in a human understandable language” one of his three pivotal items summing up the advice NSSL got from the seminar.

Then why on earth did the Ministry coin the acronym NSSL in the first place? To start an acronym with the letters NS does not sound well i Norwegian ears in any place. And how human understandable is it for the educational community used to go to the hosting institution for NSSL, the Network for IT-Research and Competence in Education (ITU), to make sense of the acronym presented in the navigation bar of their site?