Learning, Pepsi, Pickles, and Spaghetti Sauce?

One of the best books I've read recently was Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about first impressions and missed opportunities. So, I was intrigued when one of my favorite blogs, e-learning Weekly posted an article which tied a 2004 TED Gladwell talk to the concept of learning preferences [Link to post].

The 13 minute YouTube video is well worth the look-see [Link to video]

In a nutshell, Gladwell discusses an obsessed physicist who had been unsuccessful in determining the ultimate, perfect percent of artificial sweetener for Diet Pepsi. His conclusion was that there is no "perfectly sweetened Diet Pepsi"; rather the answer was there were many perfect Diet Pepsis. Of course, this is not what Pepsi wanted to hear. Vlasic Pickles, however, heard his message and, instead of trying to create a single perfect pickle, created a second kind of zesty pickle which appealed to the taste buds of an entirely different group than did the original Vlasic Pickle.

The reputation-building victory for the physicist, however, was with Prego spaghetti sauce which, in spite of being a superior product was losing to Ragu in the spaghetti sauce wars of the 70's. So you know what this guy did? He worked the the Prego folks and created a gazillion varieties of Prego and taste-tested them with folks around the country and, instead of looking for THE winner, grouped the preferences into data clusters which indicated three categories of taste preferences, one of which was not available at all on super market shelves. The short story is that Prego took over the market by meeting a "need" for chunky spaghetti sauce.

So, what does that have to do with learning? As with the spaghetti sauce, there is no perfect learning approach, there are perfect learning approachES. How many varieties of learning opportunities do you offer in your own instructional environments? If you do vary your instruction, is it within your comfort zone, or do you make an effort to determine the preferences of your students? How do you know the preferences of your students? As Gladwell points out, you can't ask them; they probably don't know!

The thing to remember IMHO, is that there is no perfect instructional approach, there is no hierarchy of instructional approaches where one is better than another. There ARE however, variable instructional approaches which will appeal to different people. Like chunky Prego and Gray Poupon, there are instructional approaches that have never been tried, but once experienced might blow the socks off our current ideas about learning.

Just something to comtemplate.