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MicroWeb presentation

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Successful conference

As you might have noticed from the number of posts on this weblog, I got a lot of inspiration at the MicroLearning conference in Austria. I met a lot of interesting people, like Thomas Vanderwal, George Siemens, Norm Friesen, David Smith and others. A very nice group of people.

On day two I was pretty tired as I did a lot the two days before. I had to log off a bit and digest the experiences of the earlier days. I had to get the ideas out of my head on the weblog. My ideas are further fine-tuned and sharpened.

In short a very useful conference.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • articles • presentation
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MicroLearning 2006 - presentations

Today I was very busy preparing my speeches and interviews for the MicroLearning conference. Yesterday I presided a workshop on Web 2.0. So pretty busy, but my part has ended now.

The workshop was pretty good. It made me realise again that I am on the bleeding edge. A lot of people in audience do not use Web 2.0 yet, no blogging, no rss, no microcontent. So that is good to realise.

In the presentations I tried to stay practical and show what MicroContent is in practice. And how one can manage and mash MicroContent Items in practice. And I got some ideas what we like to see in the future around MicroContent.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • articles • presentation
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MicroContent presentation - new version

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MicroContent presentation

After re-reading my presentation on MicroContent, that I presented at the MicroLearning conference last year, I decided that I could do better. I can split my message now over two sessions, so I have more time to explain things. So I decided to devote the first session to the what of MicroContent and take more time explaining and pointing out things. I finished my first version now.

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MicroWeb braindump

For my presentation at MicroLearning 2006, I created my first braindump on the MicroWeb. You can find everything already on my blog, but is is very fragmented there. So it is nice to have a story line in this presentation. That is the nice thing of a conference, you are forced to create a story.

The goal of this story is to show the "how" of MicroContent. How will consumers use MicroContent in practice? What tools will they use to digest, create and publish MicroContent?

The coming week I will polish the presentation a bit, which will imply removing and adding some things. And I will create my presentation sheets.

Categories/tags: articles • presentation
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MicroWeb presentation

Categories/tags: MicroContent • articles • presentation
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MicroLearning 2006

I am starting to think about the MicroLearning 2006 conference. Martin Lindner was so kind to invite me again. So I have to start preparing my presentations.

Martin scheduled me on three occations:

• The Micromedia revolution panel - I guess I will introduce the idea of MicroContent here. I am not sure how much the audience will be into MicroContent, but I assume an introduction wll be sufficient. So I will revamp my presentation of last year;
• Interview: the InfoCloud concept - great to be in this with Thomas vander Wal. I guess not much preparation for this one. Maybe I have to reread the InfoCloud stuff. But I hope that much of my personal experience with MicroContent, mashing and creating a MicroWeb comes in useful here. An interview is not a place for sheets, but I must have some oneliners 5 want to get across;
• MicroWeb / Semantic Web - this might be an interesting panel. I need to create something on the MicroWeb for this one;

So it is time to get to work. Still have to check whether it is useful to arrive a day earlier for the pre-conference thing.

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Conference evaluation

Well the MicroLearning conference is done and the BlogWalk afterwards as well. So time for an evaluation. I did already a lot of evaluation in the individual reports. So time for the big question: was it worthwhile.

YES. For me it was. It was very stimulating. I met great people. We had very good discussions. I got a lot of new ideas around MicroContent. There are a lot of ideas that can be expanded. With Sebastien Pacquet I went over an idea to create a wiki in order to stimulate discussion and build-up of the MicroContent idea. There will also be links with Innsbruck that need follow-up.

It can keep me busy for a while. So a question for me will be how much time I can devote to this subject. I also want (and must) to do some other things. The must will naturally get priority. But this is surely a great subject.

Categories/tags: presentation , microcontent; microlearning;
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Closing panel session

Erich Neuhold, University of Vienna & IPSI, talks where e-learning is going. He is sceptic about all the new concepts around learning. Unproved concepts have been applied to innocent subjects. There are already many learning tools on the graveyard. Learning is sweaty. Interaction is limited, personalisation non-existent, etc. Does not believe that tutoring goes away. Technology is insufficient, organisations insufficient. We need a total rethinking of learning when we move to digital space. He is a wiki non-believer in a purpose-driven learning context. Standardisation lacks, Quality Management is unclear. Where is the meat (profit, goal, teacher, evaluation)?

New organisational forms however need other learning concepts. Do we know enough about the learner? Are teachers up to change? How about copyright? There however many examples where technology improved society and also the related learning.

Categories/tags: presentation , microlearning; learning;
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Day 2 - panel 4

Christian Langreiter and Andreas Bolka (System One) talk about Snips&Spaces. A consequence of Microlearning is that the organisation is shifted to the learner. So you need a Microlearning Management System for planning, organisation and exploration. Weblogs do not support organisation. Introduces wiki’s. Snip is a piece of information and Space is a collection of Snips. Wants to combine wiki’s and weblogs. They add dynamic views. They demo their system. I always wonder whether a wiki will function for me. I am not convinced yet. I guess have to find my limits in the blog system first. I miss the structured microcontent for instance. But I agree with them that the finding of things is missing. However in the wiki i must do a lot of things explicitly. For the moments I go the tag way.

Martin Lindner of Research Studios Austria introduces the MicroMedia knowledge worker. He takes a historic perspective back to 1964 (Drucker, McLuhan, Kay, Nelson). Message seems to be nothing new under the sun. Knowledge was always micro. The question is whether it still has value for what we are doing now.

Gernot Tscherteu realitylab.at on the Blogosphere map inspired. Looking at your neigbourhood via blogrolls (blogstreet). This is not very granular. blogdex shows the most popular blog items in time. However a real network map shows more. He shows a blogosphere map around words and how things change in time. The learning principles defined by Montessori might be applicable to blogs and learning.

Categories/tags: presentation , microcontent; microlearning; wiki; blogosphere;
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Society benefits

In one of the comments Mark Kramer asks what are the benefits of Microlearning and implied MicroContent. I do not know about the learning aspect. I am not into learning theory. However some keywords I picked up here are self-learning, lifelong learning, everywhere learning. Basically what is said is that MicroContent can be available at any place and any time. And you can use that to learn something. And the learning can go in small steps. And that adds to existing learning methods, but does not replaces them! But how this will work and how effective it will be, we do not know yet. It is just starting.

At several times it was remarked that a business focus should be added to the subject of microlearning. It seems that some haste is felt due to globalisation. Microlearning could help Europe. I have mixed feelings about that, but then we will get into politics.

Categories/tags: presentation , microcontent; microlearning;
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Day 2 - panel 3: mobile & learning

Beverley Oliver, Curtin University of Technology, Australia, on mobile blogging, skyping and postcasting. How to teach teachers to teach better. Their university defined nine aims of the university, which is much broader than just knowledge. And it is really about skills. Teenagers are now screenagers. Do students learn with new technologies. Doen een experiment met een wireless HP iPaq waarop Skype en podcasting. It is a technological challenge. The project still has to start.

Pasi Mattila (Oulo) describes the Moop-project (mobile learniing). Students can take pictures, text, audio with geotags in the field. What a student must do is given by tasks, which are triggered by GPS. Everything gets posted to the web. The application uses a Mindmap-kind of function. He shows pushtotalk (3 phones) with which you can reach all students at the same time.

Silvia Gabrielli, University of Rome, about designing learning experiences for microlearning. Focus on individual knowledge workers who get small chunks of content in any place. She classifies varies learning experiences based on a time (instant vs continuous) an location (single vs everywhere) axis. She kind of gives an overview of the field. Demands for MicroContent: highly transferable, unobtrusive, easy available, user friendly. persistent (user profile), useful, individual and sharable, adaptable/adaptive. Can we find other attributes for MicroContent here? Or are we talking about the content itself, containers and devices?

Categories/tags: presentation , microcontent; microlearning; mobile; learning;
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Day 2: panel 2

They have two parallel sessions. One is more technical, but from the old school. The other is more about learning, but based on the Internet stuff. I am into new school, lowercase, so I chose this session.

Sebastian Fiedler, University Augsburg, starts with the definition of learning. He defines it as changes in behaviour and experience. That is certainly the way we looked at it from a services definition point of view. You need evaluation systems to check whether a change has been taken place. He talks about an environment, where learners have more freedom, where the learning process is no longer deterministic. Radical Constructivism is the new term for this new form of learning. Goes into MicroContent. Can the MicroContent attributes also be used for non-computer data. I think it can. I tried to have the definition that it applicable to anything, but I have to look at it again. But we should look at the network version as a subject of research. The non-network version should have been done 30 years ago.

Stephan Mosel, (University of Gießen, plasticthinking.org), talks about self directed learning. Referable is a better attribute for MicroContent. Maybe we should define an extra attribute to define Internet-based MicroContent. In that case referable would mean a permalink. He explains constructivism. It is about subjective perception, not objective reality, auto-poietic (what a word, everybody has his personal view?). Related to this is self organised learning. Blogs construct people on the net. Unit of knowledge are better to discuss than a complex article. Small Items on a Wiki get easier feedback from learners. Authority of a weblog is an important issue, however with weblogs people will try you until authority and trust is established.

Roger Fischer (blog, Kaywa) begins with some comments from Supernova. Blogs are about content and network, not the tool. Kaywa is a community with moblogging. He uses Kaywa to read blog-items that he has detected in his workplace on his mobile while he is on the road. The items are pushed to the mobile. Normally a multiple device problem implies a service solution. So I guess in this case a new aggregator service could do this as well.

Categories/tags: presentation , microcontent; microlearning; learning; blogsystem;
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Presentation version 3

My latest version (version 0.3) of my presentation is now online. In this version I straightened my English. I prepared this one in the train coming here.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • articles • presentation
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