Creating Passionate Users

Marketing professionals are already aware of the importance of user attitudes towards products. User loyalty can be won by regularly exceeding user expectations and giving them just that extra bit more to create passionate and thus loyal users. Products that consumers mark as good are on a good path, but those that users mark as very good or even excellent have the potential of gaining user loyalty.

And while most of the really successful companies are trying to catch up with the consumer centered production, or educational system is still ages behind. From my experience of formal education schools are run for school's sake - meaning that they don't really try to create knowledge, but to achieve preset goals that don't really care about the participants (and here I mean both teachers and students). Teachers must "teach" a certain quantity of facts that students will forget in a few months anyway - but hey! the school's plan was carried out! And the evaluation only takes place a few times a year and few care to wonder if what is being taught is really being learnt.

Surely, these days learner centered design is a big word, but (speaking from my personal experience) it is still too slow in catching up with real life education. And that is why I think it is important for educators to actively think about the needs of our students and share our experience with other educator - and more than ever the technology to do it is now at hand.

Blogs are certainly a great way to stimulate reflection and share ideas, and one blog I will certainly keep an eye on is Creating Passionate Users. The reading of this blog was actually what motivated me to write this post, and although there are still many interesting posts I have to catch up, I'd suggest reading the article Crash course in learning theory as a starting point in this great blog. Click, click - this blog certainly goes to my favorite RSS feeds!