Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Creating Passionate Learners

I stumbled upon Kathy Sierra's blog again today...(can't remember how or why) Creating Passionate Users. She is an awesomely unique spirit, and it is reflected in her blog. While most of her rants are not around corporate eLearning...they smack of similar issues and concerns that eLearning developers face from day to day. After all we are software developers too, right?

She has a great post titled Most Classroom Learning Sucks. I couldn't agree more. I'll add that most eLearing sucks too. We continue to create page-turning online learning that is nothing more than structured html pages order like chapters in a book. What's worse is that we continue to fool ourselves (myself included at times) into believing that what we really need is more Flash, and more interactive Flash animtions, and on, and on. Its all boring junk... UNLESS...

it's wildly entertaining...

the user has a powerful motivator either internal or external...

OR the user is engaged in a collaborative discussion, helping to create the content while learning it, asking questions, solving problems, responding to feedback, applying the knowledge in a familiar context, experimenting with the new knowledge, etc.

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