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Ignore the customer experience, lose a billion dollars (Walmart case study) – Good Experience

Saved on April 18, 2011

The mistake was a lack of customer focus. I know, I know: “They ran a survey! Customers loved the idea!” But that’s exactly the problem. Walmart didn’t pursue the question of what customers wanted. Instead, Walmart came up with the answer first, then asked customers to agree to it. That’s exactly the wrong thing to do, because it ignores customers while attempting to fool stakeholders into thinking that the strategy is customer-centered.

Put another way, Walmart based this incredibly expensive misadventure on what customers said, rather than what they did. And the customer experience is all about what customers do. In real life. No hypotheticals. Walmart acted without considering the customer experience, and that was a big mistake. (

You Got This. I Got This. Rebecca Black’s “Friday”. | The Line

Saved on April 14, 2011

First: You have all the completely unearned, massive engagement of kids who know this song was released only two or three weeks ago to 85 million hits on Youtube. Strong recommendation: don’t wait. Get this into your classroom before two weeks are out.

Second: Like every other human being, kids jump at the chance to be the experts. They ache to be critics on why a piece of writing works or doesn’t. Let them.

Finally: Everyone talks about anchor papers and quality exemplars, but just as instructional– and often a heck of a lot more fun– is looking at work that is really, really bad.

Open Education (Experiential eLearning)

Saved on April 11, 2011

The Open Education ‘movement’ has several facets.  A primary facet is access from the learner perspective — it seeks to ensure broad access to content by making it freely available and easy to procure.  Another is sharing from the educator perspective — the ability for educators not just to create content but to then disemminate quality online resources, or “open educational resources” (OER).  Another facet is re-use.  The movement does not simply aim to allow educators and learners to share materials, but additionally seeks to empower those users to edit the content and customize it for their own context/environment (sometimes referred to as ‘remixing’).

This challenges current academic content paradigms on a number of levels.  At a fundamental level it challenges the concept known as the ‘iron triangle’ binding access, quality and cost — the notion that these are fixed relationships.