Category general

Speedgeeking sessions

These are very short sessions (5 mins) with 5-6 listeners.

Christian Langreiter - System One and their drawing based Flickr search [nice]

Michael Dreusicke - Paux, a semantic content management system [looks difficult]

Mark Kramer - tools and technology for learning [high level]

Roger Fischer - QR codes [see other blog item]

Anja Wagner - creating and distributing videocasts. Still some hurdles to bridge different platforms.

Pedro Sanchez Villalon - AWLA, system for managing english teaching to spanish students.

Martin Ebner - TU Graz goes podcasts. Technology not a problem, human issues are.

Teemu Leinonen - Lemill.net, a wiki like 'courseware' creator for primary and secondary school teachers. Contains learning process aspects and is easier to use than a wiki.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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Café Roger Fischer / Martin Hofmann—Mobile tagging

Talking about physical tagging with QR codes and Datamatrix code. These are 2-dimensional codes (compare with barcodes). However it is much more open than barcodes, think more of language script. Phone becomes a barcode scanner, also needs an internet browser in order to access the corresponding website. Strong support in Japan. Users chose to use it, easy. Also used on websites. In that way you can bookmark it on your phone and access the info later. QR codes in second Life, hybridisation. QR codes can contain SMS's, nice for retrieving coupons. QR codes on products for checking producers in order to guarantee quality. Think of this as an obligatory URL to access quality parameters of a product. QR-code generator to encode URL's, text, phone number or SMS. In theory you can encode 4000 characters, however most readers can not handle this yet. T-shirts with QR-codes are cool.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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Café Uhlf-Daniel Ehlers - quality in corporate learning

He is noting tags based on the discussion, kind of creating a folksonomy, a mindmap.

What is corporate learning, just another context? What is quality there? It is seen different. Are there different sectors? Culture, strategy or tools? Quality of corporate learning is how well the knowledge is shared? [is knowledge really needed, it gets stale to quickly, one should the processes for acquiring knowledge]. Teams are key to lifelong learning. Exchange of experiences can not be exchanged.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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Stephanie Rieger café

Authorship process around mobile. What could be people be making for a mobile? Opera mini browser. Things are changing quite rapidly. Producing proper content is behind the technological developments. Finding a common denominator from a technological point of view. Find the constant things. We need new skill sets. Create new tools for our small attention span. Learning has not changed. our working memory has not changed. The computer, the automation paradigm, does not fit learning. Business however wants to manage and speed up. Nature of the game has changed. How can you mark & grade the learning? Commenting on blogs is a form of grading. Civil networks. Discussing moderating feedback. Censorship?

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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Hemma Kocher from Headshift talking

Social software for workplaces. Problem is that a lost of time is wasted in organisations. [not sure about that, we need relax time]. Problem is also bundling expertise. "knowledge is not a tree, but a pile of leaves". Finding answers in an organisation is difficult. Existing content management systems do not provide answers. Learning from each other in a better way. It must be people driven.

Key elements of Enterprise 2.0 are the social tools, such as blogs, wiki, folksonomy, bookmarking, im; an ecosystem of data (rss, microformats, api's); participatory culture. [interesting to note that we already worked at this within KPN Research 5 years ago]. Use cases are in temas, r&D.

Examples they did for the NHS based on a Wiki, bookmarking for law firms, shared news reading [sounds interesting]. [Are people willing to participate? It requires investment before you get something out]

All about building a better personal radar. Software is not enough. Going for second wave adopters.

Is this the 'new' knowledge management'. Is 'management' a good word? Is it an 'old' word? Management sounds like hierarchy. It should not!!! be supervised. It must stay informal and open. It is all about the formal relationships within a company. What induces a change of behaviour in a company? When start people adopting? Takes time. Key is that it really helps the work. Naturally the experience with these services is still young.

Hemma Kocher is from Headshift

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • general • web 2.0 , microlearning2007
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Workshop discussion

Wednesday we had a discussion around web2.0 and MicroContent here at the MicroLearning conference. I did an intro on the issue of memory of the Internet. In preparation I did a vanity search into myself. I was able to find contributions of myself to mailing lists and usenet from 1993 and 1994. That is great memory. If I however look at my contributions to the web, a lot is lost. I changed web hosters, companies went out of business, etc.

So one should be aware what happens to your MicroContent. Do you want to save it? Does it matter? And what can and should you do? All this is related to outboard memory, unbundling, web 3.0 (?), microcontent, unwalled gardens, etc.

Afterwards the discussion moved into the realm of privacy, misuse, possibilities in the workplace. Interesting twist. There was not much worry by the way that information would be lost. You should see it more as speech, which you do not record either.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , microlearning2007
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Mobile @ ML 2007

Again I have been invited to help out at the MicroLearning 2007 conference in Innsbruck, Austria. So I started looking at the speakers that have been invited.

On the mobile front I see Roger Fischer (nice to see you again), Ajit Jaokar (follow his blog already a long time) and Steph Rieger (we had a small contact when I blogged about Yiibu). Will be interesting again.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Transit data

Google Maps Mania: Google Maps adds transit data for dozens of cities worldwide!

This means that one can lookup bus stops on a Google Map, click on it. And one sees when the buses pass by in the coming hour. Sounds very useful.

Does this imply that I must always have Google Maps open and visible for my neighbourhood, so that I can see what will happen in the coming hour? Like to see who is going to drive, walk by.

[Inspiration GoogleMaps Mania]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Beyond the Golden Triad

Which MicroContent Type comes beyond the Golden Triad. It is difficult to say. I think that we should not take a cue from the PC environments, but from other environments, such as mobile phones and game consoles.

The mobile phone points to the address card. In its essence it is already there since the conception of the mobile phone. The implementation is however horrific. It is a terrible experience if you want to share address information. And that is also true for the PC environment. Game consoles have some extremely basic support for address cards. One can wonder where things went wrong here. Everything is there in principle, but it does not work well.

And maybe the other MicroContent type can be a blog item. There is some support on the PSP and on mobile phones. However it not really about sharing and exchanging blog-item. Twitter adds some new aspect of distributing items through SMS. But it is still not as easy to exchange blog-items as the Golden Triad.

And that is about it. Game consoles do not support anything else. Mobile phone neither. There are many attempts to introduce other items, but the other types are really closed gardens.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Hybrid apps are here

A great entry about the web versus desktop applications issue. A discussion of web versus desktop apps are silly.

[Inspiration Brent Simmons]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , apps, desktop, web, hybrid
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My Google Maps are Lists

I have been pondering the MicroContent within My Google Maps. And I came to the conclusion that Is hould see these as ordered and unordered lists. Let me explain.

The basic Item within these maps are the points. These points are the MicroContent Items. Each point contains of multiple fields such as longitude, latitude, title and description. What is missing is a permalink for each point however. One can exchange these points between users and they hold their meaning.

However combining multiple points into a list adds extra meaning. This is just as a blog can evolve from single posts to a journal with multiple posts, where the order of the posts will evolve to a story.

Thus a line on a Google Map is an unorder list of points. And when I used it to designate a route I took, it evolves into an ordered list. And this ordered list provides extra meaning: there is a start- and an endpoint. A Google Map is even more complex as one can mix multiple points with multiple lines and multiple area's. Thus the list even grows into groups of lists.

Note that one can add titles and descriptions to lines and area's as well. This turns lines and area's into MicroContent Items itself and turns Google Maps into a complex network of MicroContent.

I should add that these Lists are also published as KML-files and thus this MicroContent can be opened in Google Earth as well.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general • type • listing , google, maps
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Humour: Le supermarche 2.0

Imagine a web2.0 supermarket. Very nice video.

[Inspiration Techcrunch en Français]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , humour
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SL and MicroContent

Bryan Alexander wonders about the combination between Second Life and MicroContent. I like to generalise this. Personally I do not like SL very much. I get lost in it and it seems a time waster for me. But then the web was that initially as well. And there are probably other worlds you could look at as well. I think I will be intrigued by Home on the PS3. I did see a nice combination between that world and MicroContent. In the video I saw you could combine a 3D TV (thinks SL) and show a video on it. The same thing could be done with images and picture frames in that world. You did have to import the images and video into that world through your personal PS3. And it is easy extend that to other kinds of MicroContent.

You should see these worlds (and the web) as canvasses in which you can mash MicroContent. The MicroContent Items can be seen as a bottom layer. These are the atoms from which other things can be built. One such canvasses is RSS, the other the web and yet another can be SL. It all depends how open these canvasses are to the artists. By now the web is pretty open, RSS is OK, but SL seems pretty closed. SL seems to be only for a few specialists. And naturally there are canvasses where the situation is even worse, i.e. totally closed.

So the question when SL will be open to MicroContent should be asked to the canvas builders. You can wonder by the way whether you would like to place such a canvas into the hands of just one party. Fortunately SL went open source, so we might see new developments in the future.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Twitter usage

I am still playing with Twitter and still figuring out what to do with it. And I am not the only one (see Bryan). I still have a lot of questions and certainly there are a lot of possibilities. So I just start with a personal perspective. First of all I have to decide on the audience. Is Twitter for the world? for my friends? or just for myself. Or should I combine these audiences? Or create separate Twitter feeds. That is all to much in one go, so I just start with a feed for myself. And what should I post in Twitter? It should be different from my blogs, it should be different from my del.icio.us feed, so what is left? I could post the actions that I do or have done, but I am not sure that is interesting. For that I use already my blog diairy and I do not really need more details. Or I could post the places I am, but that seems a lot of detail as well. So I am left with miscellaneous thoughts that I have. Thoughts for which I do not have to work upon and create a blog entry. So I will experiment with that for a while. I still am looking for feeds by 'friends' that are worthwhile to follow. I look to see who uses this as a publishing/story medium.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general • type • blog
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They have answers, we have questions

VRM looks very interesting. I did not find the time to look into it in more, but it sounds the ultimate in reversing the chain and putting the consumer into control. Undoubtedly there is a lrage role for MicroContent and attention here. I should move this subject highr up on my reading lists.

[Inspiration Doc Searls]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general , VRM
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