training management systems vs learning management systems

One familiar discussion/rant I get into with ABB concerns the difference between training management and learning management.

Training management operates at the level of courses (classroom or virtual), learners being another cog in the mechanism (along with content, budgets, schedules, performance agreements, etc). But whilst courses might train, they don't learn.

Learning management by its very nature works at the level of individual. Only I learn. But I do not learn in a vacuum. I learn with a context of others. My actual learning management system is a mix of blogs, wikis, RSS, books, coffee conversations, tags, networks, newspapers, magazine, drunken exchanges at bus stops, epiphanies whilst watching trash TV. I can (I have to) share some of it with you. But it eludes, evades, overwhelms a trad LMS. It is more like being washed away in the rip of a lifestream.

There is something inherently, annoyingly messy about learning. We need ways of making sense of it but any attempt to control it is doomed to fail.

This presentation by Stephen Downes says a lot of this (and much more) in a much prettier way.