For the centuries, schools have been quite closed institutions, living their own life. During the 20th century, professionalisation of teachers and advances in educational sciences increased even further the isolation of schools from society - only experts in educational field were legitimized to make important decisions regarding teaching methods, textbooks, curriculum. But now, the situation is changing. The rise of e-learning, together with politisation, globalisation and marketisation of education have opened the domain of schooling to the impact from other fields. School principals are expected to learn the language and working culture of business administrators, teacher should become project managers and social workers, the professional jargon of people in the field of textbook publishing and educational media is hardly digesting the plenty of new technical terms like learning management systems, learning objects, metadata, repositories etc. The vocabulary of education is retreating, losing its native territory to foreign voices, being marginalised. The situation is made even worse by endless 'civil war' of different paradigms inside the camp of educational sciences. And finally - teachers have not been eager to use 'research-based' vocabularies anyway, the chasm between the theory and practice of teaching. Because of this (and in order to reach largest possible target group with the same product), the developers of the modern virtual learning environments are trying hard to avoid any vocabulary or functionalities that can be connected to certain pedagogical theory or teaching method. The desire of 'pedagogical neutrality' makes sense from marketing perspective, but it is not straightforward to predict what impact does it have to pedagogical thinking and practices of the teachers using these software products. The built-in pedagogical neutrality of LMS seems to increase the alienation of theoretical discourse of educational science from the practice of teaching and learning. The importance of language cannot be overestimated, it has been stressed already by Heidegger (language is the 'house of being'). For Gadamer, the language was a virus-like entity which is using human beings as carriers (we do not speak language, 'language speaks us'). Metaphorically speaking, the languages compete with each other, trying to conquer the larger territories. Contemporary American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty describes the evolution, life cycles and incommensurability of vocabularies. According to Rorty, the ultimate ambition of every scientist (or school of thought) is to provide a new, hopefully 'the final' (meta)vocabulary which allows to redescribe all previous theories in the field. The new vocabularies are born first as the sets of metaphors, 'borrowing' the semantics from other domains. When the vocabulary develops, metaphors are evolving into strictly defined terms. People are switching from one vocabulary to another if it seems to be more practical, useful (i.e. suits better for describing and explaining the important phenomena). Thus, we can interpret the modern pedagogical theories as advanced vocabularies, that help us better describe and explain the aspects of learning and instruction. In our research in the Centre for Educational Technology, we are interested in the impact of the vocabularies, structures and functionalities provided by the modern virtual learning environments to pedagogical thinking and practices of teaching staff. In connection with this, we have developed a learning management system called IVA, which has been designed deliberately in a 'pedagogically biased' way. The bias is towards the social-constructivist approaches of learning and teaching. In this paper, we are going to introduce the pedagogical foundations and pragmatic considerations, underlying the design of IVA. The characteristics of the IVA system itself will be described together with users' feedback based on the first experiences of using IVA in Tallinn Pedagogical University.