Category general

ODP Viewpoints and Maps

I have been pondering the comments of @Downes on one of my previous posts. In the comments he says that any map is one-dimensional. I am not sure what he means by that, but I take it that he says that any maps lacks aspects. This reminded me of the viewpoints of the ODP Reference Model. These viewpoints are interesting as they intend to separate (separation of concerns) things and offer various abstractions.

Now back to my map. My map shows the relation between the Information Viewpoint (the MicroContent Types/Objects) and the Computational Viewpoint (Applications/Services). The Enterprise Viewpoint is not relevant here, as the intentions and goals of the user are unknown. The Computational Viewpoint covers the actions a user wants perform on the MicroContent Objects (create, read, get, publish, etc.).

In these two viewpoints we should not talk about protocols, API’s, systems, software, distribution of components, etc. In several of the PLE diagrams, I see all the Viewpoints mixed, resulting (at least for me) in an unclearer picture. Unfortunately this is also often reallife reality, users a confronted with all kinds of technological and engineering aspects and they shouldn’t be. Things should be more transparant.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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MicroContent map and PLE’s

@Downes saw my Microcontent Map and sees a parallel with Personal learning Environments. He points to one of his presentations. So I had a look.

I must say that I find the drawings a bit hard to grasp. What I take out of these drawings is that many components (systems, services, software, etc.) are involved, many type of contents (user generated, professional), content is distrbuted over multiple places, API’s, etc.

For me the problem with such diagrams is that they try to describe the world in a single image, on multiple abstraction levels. These diagrams are nice show the complexity, but I miss some internal logic. And that logic is what I am always looking for.

These (personal) MicroContent Maps are an attempt to attain some logic. Let me explain these levels:

1. Me - at the top-level is the user that consumes (toMe) or publishes content. The user also needs other functions to manage his content;
2. MicroContent Type - on the second level are the MicroContent Types, the various forms of MicroContent. One could add other file formats (documents, spreadsheets, presentations), etc, to this level, but I chose to limit myself to MicroContent;
3. MicroContent Applications - on the third level are the applications that are used to consume/publish individual MicroContent Items. I limited myself here to applications. One could add here services that one uses through a browser;
4. MicroContent Services - and on the third level one has the MicroContent Services that communicate with MicroContent Clients through either API’s or feeds (Atom/RSS);

Naturally there are things missing from these maps. They are limited to what I actually use for instance. I would like to add the distinction between API, RSS-based and embedded MicroContent for instance. I think I should add Browser-based services, such as Gliffy in some way.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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MicroContent Map

Inspired by Loic LeMeur post on his Social Map, I decided to create something similar for me. But I take a different twist, the MicroContent twist. I want to map for each MicroContent Type that i uses the corresponding clients and services. This comes in 3 variants: toMe, aroundMe and fromMe, i.e. MicroContent that comes to me, exists around me (local) and that goes away from me. It is tempting to describe what is possible, but I want to focus on what I actually use.

My toMe map:

The toMe-map describes the clients I use to get MicroContent Items from the Internet. This can be through a feed, embedded in a web-page / HTML-fragment or as free Items with corresponding permalinks. Some clients are closely related to a corresponding web-service.

The other clients are basically generic ones and not tied to a specific service. I guess the message is here that I do not like to be locked in into any service.

The fromMe map looks a bit different:

What it basically says, is that I use a private solution for publishing. Only for images and video I started using public services in order to lower the burden of my file storage. And I have no practical experience with events and audio publishing.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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MicroPulse thoughts

I had several thoughts when reading Martin’s MicroPulse proposal. It was not easy to get my head around it. I am not sure whether it is appropriate to respond on my blog, but here I go. The thoughts are a bit unstructured and low-level at this stage and are created while reading.

I am a bit reluctant in creating systems. There are already so many things around. But then I am not familiar enough with KnowledgePulse.

The concept of ‘Continuous Partial Attention’ is interesting. With all the information flowing towards our devices (thanks to RSS), we live in an information sea that is very close to us. The question is whether we will pay attention to that sea. If I look at Twitter or Jaiku, then there is a peripheral component. But there are also other examples reminding of radio.

On my platform I created such a sea. Thanks to Growl a small windowlet pops up in the right-top corner of my screen, with the latest tweet. This windowlet stays there for 1 second and dissolves into the background. I have a choice to look at it and read the message, or just let it pass. Information in this windowlet can come from a variety of sources, such as Twitter, Jaiku, last.fm and all kinds of other status messages from local applications. Think also of instant messaging clients, where you notice your friends login and -out. This kind of information flow is like being ‘next to the sea’.

Fortunately there is no attention grabbing. When I do not look at this local sea, then it will be lost, but nothing will be lost.

This is a bit different from beeps from the mail application to indicate that there is new mail, or indicators to show how much new mail, rss-item, etc you have waiting for you.

The idea of an application taking over when there is no foreground activity (afk), reminds me of a screensaver. This screensaver would then sequentially present new Items from the subscribed RSS feeds.

The Growl-messages could be ‘calls for attention’. It however depends how intrusive these calls are. At the moment it is relatively hard for me to react to these calls: I can not click on them, I have to see the associated application and put that application to the front.

As soon as you are going to react to impulses from the sea, you are going in. You are opeining your Twitter client, RSS-client, etc, and are going to read the information for real.

In the MicroPulse description also more intrusive examples of Micropulses are mentioned. I have to ‘click-away’ these pulses, the come back until I did something with it. It reminds me of annoying pop-up, pop-under windows, of bouncing dock-items, etc. All requiring me to change my focus from my current task to something else. I do not want to be overwhelmed by waves from the sea.

The micro-information loop tries to establish the relation between this sea and the user. This relation is determined by the interaction the user has with that information, i.e. the amount of attention the user awards to that information. As described, there can be many levels of (’moe’ tweets whether I like to play Mario Kart with him on the DS) attention.

A question is, whether this attention recording process must be something explicit, as described with the Flash cards.

The idea of a context dependent sea/radio is an interesting one. It might lower the information overload burden, it is no longer necessary to switch contexts. But then these tweets ‘out of context’ are also nice and offer the coffe machine environment.

I have mixed feelings on the recorder thing. I am all in favor, in fact I tried to set up something for my self with, blogs, bookmarks, etc. In reality I do not seem to benefit from it. I guess that this is just the state of art. Recommendation is still extremely lousy. But here seems to main challenge.

For the moment no comments on the system part, it all depends what you want to accomplish.

[Inspiration MicroPulse]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Friend channels

I have been looking a bit at the video's on Qik. These are video's that are uploaded automatically from a mobile phone. It looks as if many of those video's are very silly. In a sense they remind me of the tweets on Twitter. Some of these items are well thought burps of their others, but many just are not. In this sense sense they seem to be video micro-blogs.

What happens when we can combine these 'qiks' in a television channel? So you can subscribe to what you friends are looking at (and are saying).

And when talking about channels, what happened to audio. Are we missing a step here? Where are the audio channels? Where is my ambient channel from by combined friends?

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Thoughts about MicroContent State of Affairs

Lately I have been thinking about writing up a MicroContent State of Affairs. I have the impression that there has not been happening much lately. But that depends at what aspect you look. So I start of with some thoughts.

Theory - I do not see anything happening on the theoretical front of MicroContent. But maybe I am looking at the wrong angle here. I guess that the Semantic Web can (and is) contributing here a lot, but I do not feel that impact.

Type Ranges - I am a proponent of many MicroContent Types. There are already many types available, but there does not seem to much growth. The main types are still the golden triad (audio, image, video). Naturally blogs and micro-blogs are still continuing to get attention, and are still growing.

Other types just have a lot less impact. Where are the other types? Where are the downloadable recipes? I assume that the acceptance of other MicroContent Types depends on the availability of standards and support in services and applications. That is where the portable identity is stalling now (and getting new traction). And Locations (as in KML) are now getting traction. What is happening with bookmarks?

Mashing - The number of mash-ups are still increasing. Have to look a bit more into this. Many mash-ups are based on Google Maps. These are not really MicroContent related mash-ups, but more general Web 2.0 approaches. Many mash-ups are limited to widgets, i.e. filling a web-page. That is all OK, but I would like to see a next step.

Adoption - the more interesting things are now happening around adoption. How much MicroContent is going around? How many people are actually using it? The growth of downloadable audio, video, rss are good indicators here. I have to gather some numbers here.

Usage - the more interesting things are happening around adoption. How are people using all that MicroContent. Twitter is here an interesting subject. The same goes for delicious. Personally I just do not use, but other swear by it. What am I missing? How is podcasting going?, etc, etc.

Devices - how is MicroContent evolving on other (i.e. non-pc) devices. Naturally the iPod, Smart Phones, but also car navigators.

Business - how make people money on MicroContent. YouTube and Flickr come to mind. What are the services? What are the business models?

Enough stuff to do some work on.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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microcontent foodchain: best practices?

Martin wonders about the foodchain/flow of MicroContent and best practices.

drowning in the plenitude of microcontent-apps, i would be grateful for exchange and discussion of some possible micro-foodchain/workflow-patterns - personally practiced and/or just theoretical. i'm feeling a bit lost here and still haven't really got my thing together. i suspect you have some more mature techniques and concepts ... anyway, the discussion of apps should be enhanced by the discussion of practices across apps, and of user experiences in a microcontent environment context."

I am not sure what the best practices are. It is a good idea to gather experiences though, I notice that people really do different things. So I'll start with my daily approach to MicroContent usage.

• blog items - for reading blogs/feeds I use NetNewsWire. My list of RSS-feeds is pretty stable, I only add a feed when a blog-item points to something interesting. For publishing blog-items in one of my blogs I use MarsEdit. I use my own publishing environment based on Expression Engine to publish my blog-items;
• microblog items - as a microblog is just a special case, I also use NetNewsWire to view the corresponding RSS-finds. However to follow the community in realtime, I use Twitterific and Juhu. For publishing I created an AppleScript and use Quicksilver. Publishing is done on Twitter, Jaiku and my own environment simultaneously;
• bookmarks - for bookmarks I use WebnoteHappy. Creation is done through an AppleScript that takes the data from either my web-browser or newsreader. Publication is done automatically to my personal environment and to del.icio.us;
• audio - naturally I use iTunes to manage my audio. As yet I do not publish any audio, so I have no solution present;
• video - also using iTunes here. Unfortunately iTunes does not support to many video-formats, so I use Miro/Democracy as well (not to happy about that app). No publishing experience;
• images - using iPhoto to manage the stuff taken with my camera. I however have mixed feelings of mixing my screen shots with my camera pics. I started using Skitch and liking it. In order to publish images I used my own server space and FTP'd to it with Transmit. Now I started using Flickr and MySkitch and will probably move to these services;
• recipes - using MacGourmet and publish to my own environment. Need to look into publication process, as I am not happy with the current approach;
• reviews - I use the same approach as that for blog-items. I played with the LibraryThing service and with Delicious Library, but have not yet settled on a good approach.
• address cards I use the standard AddressBook app, and I do not publish;
• locations - I am still discovering this MicroContent type. I am working with Google Earth, Google Maps and now RapidoMap. I also use my own publishing solutions;
• events - I have a very light agenda, so I only use iCal and no publishing solutions;

For mashing and creating a MicroWeb, I mainly rely on Apple's Mediabrowser that is supported in many apps. For images I start to use the Skitch markups. Otherwise I have to define the links myself. This is still a badly covered area.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • general
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Forrester Disses Microcontent

Forrester seems to advice that businesses focus on full fledged websites for mobiles and not on MicroContent apps or widgets. I have no iPhone, so it is difficult to judge. However I already prefer MicroContent apps over the corresponding web-sites. I see no reason why this will be different for the iPhone.

[Inspiration IrishEyes aka topgold]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Conference evaluation

As a final post on MicroLearning 2007 I would like to sum up some personal conclusions.

The conference was excellent. The format of small keynotes, lots of discussion space, café sessions and speedgeeking rounds involve participants heavy. Thus the chance that the content stays with participants is higher, the messages really get across. Again I met a lot of interesting, people with whom I probably will stay in contact, thanks to common interests. We experimented with Jaiku and Twitter, extending the classic conference environment.

From a content point of view, I have the impression that we are now moving up to higher levels. We are leaving discussions on MicroContent behind, although there is still no common understanding of the term. MicroContent understanding is really the infrastructure. There was still a lot of discussion on the tools, the products that are needed to work with the MicroContent. After hearing many sessions I noticed that the problems lie not with the tools, but the processes and then specifically the learning processes. These processes do not seem well understood and whether the tools can really be mapped to these processes is unclear.

I liked the discussions on the purpose on learning or better what should be learned at schools. It was noted that it is not the MicroContent itself that should be learned as this might change quickly after one leaves school. Although there are some universal truth, which might be useful to know and aware of. At school one should be learned the processes for learning and discovery of the right and required MicroContent. This can be learning the basic tools like David Smith is doing. Or helping to learning discovery processes like Teemu Leinonen showed. The focus was only on the learning process themselves. Herma Kocher however discussed the use of Web2.0 tools with companies. These tools are used for internal company processes. And she used here mainly service companies as examples. People do not seem to realise that learning institutions are service companies, i.e. they deliver services. In order deliver these services they have a lot of internal processes for which web2.0 tools could be used. I found this a bit in the talk of David Smith, but only superficially. Learning institutions should tap into the field of Service Management more. There is whole body of science available for the right management of service delivery.

The whole generational issue came up us well. David Smith had a nice sheet of the history of Internet mapped against the ages of a 16 year old. For these kids everything related to Internet always have been, the grew up with it. It is like it should be. In sense that makes them very special. I confronted my 13-year old son with this. He does not think himself as special, he is the normal one. And that is the challenge for older generations, they will become the odd one out. So meta-learning for the older generation will become much more important, than the microlearning for the younger ones, they will do it anyway.

This will also have to have impact on management culture. The new generation will grow up with openness, ubiquitous availability of information. In order for these web 2.0 tools to work well Hemma Kocher noted that the culture within a company has to change. Probably the new generation does not expect something else from an organisation and will no longer accept hierarchies. I guess you can catch this under the phrase of employee empowerment (nothing new here). And this will not be limited to knowledge intensive industries. And it is anyone guess what the impact will be on society.

The common theme of the conference was Intertwingularity, with thanks to Ajit Jaokar.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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Closing panel

What has everybody learned (6 people in the panel comment).

Dialogue is more important than content [I read process in this].

How to involve young people within these development processes.

What you can not measure, you can not manage. [should we want to manage all the time].

Flows of MicroContent. Create self-replicating MicroContent. Blurring borders between creation and processes. How can we help people change?

Loosely joining small pieces implies interactivity, a network.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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Speed geeking sessions

Another round of speed geeking sessions, 9 in total. Very intensive and very tiring, but a good format. The subjects discussed were extremely varied, so it is hard to find a common denominator.

A common denominator however is that the teacher are and must be learning. They need better support, facilities for evaluation what they are doing, the tools seem to be insufficient and do not really help the teacher, there is a lack of scaffolding and process.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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Teemu Leinonen - Knowledge Building in New Media Environments

He uses a design oriented approach for learning. Learning: knowledge acquisition, participation, knowledge creation. Informal learning versus non-formal learning. Internet is now knowledge building. The focus on processes is very nice. He finds that lacking in Web 2.0.

Learning Environments, a few pictures. What should the environments look like in the future?

What in the future? Time-line of history. Examples of learning environments he worked on. These learning environments implement the learning processes. Do you really want that? It is the processes that they must learn.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007, learning
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David Smith

David Smith from Preoccupations.

Reiterating TBL goal of the web for collaboration, meeting, reading and writing. Focus on network and not hierarchy. Looks at Internet timeline form someone born in 1982. For them Internet is old.

Introducing Dopplr. 'the context of computing is vastly different from the west coast labs that windows, icons, menus and pointers originated in. It's mobile, urban, rural, outdoors, underground, personal, intimate, immediate (Matt Jones)'. He uses basecamp, typepad, Tells how the pupils use various tools, such as del.icio.us, youtube, last.fm, typepad, RSS-aggregators, web-mail. Great for collaboration, however we do not teach it on school.

Teenagers are much more in contact with each other than in pre-industrtal times (65 versus 4 hours per week).

He is very enthusiastic about Facebook. [still do not know why]

Advice for schools. You can't control, but can influence. Educate about ICT, don't drill. Recognise your medium is one of collaboration.

Politicians seem to be catching up.

Explains Ted Nelsons Intertwingularity. Conciliance.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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MicroContent intro

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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Wrapping up

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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