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26 Jun 2005
Expanding MicroContent
During the MicroLearning conference Sebastian Fiedler wondered whether my definition of MicroContent was also applicable to physical types of MicroContent. I had no idea, I guessed it did. The only way to find out is to look at physical MicroContent and check it against the attributes. For this experiment I used a collection of post-it notes, which were clustered on a window after a brainstorm session. Each post-it note contains a single brainstorm idea.
It will be clear that each post-it note is a MicroContent Item and that the window on which the post-it note are put, is the MacroContent container. The main field of a post-it note is what a viewer sees. Something can be written on front and even back of the note. This image is the main field. The ordering of the Items on the window is the design of the container. In my definition a MicroContent Item will have the following attributes: small, self-contained, addressable, structured, flexibility and single. I will go through each of them.
- small - a post-it note is certainly small, even if one tried to put a lot of text on it. There just not a lot of space to write on. And in the case of brainstorm ideas, they are also focussed;
- self-contained - the post-it notes are also self-contained. It is easy to put them in another place on the window. That will not change there meaning;
- addressable - the idea of this attribute is that one should be able to find an Item back. It might be better to call this attribute referable. A post-it not is certainly referable. For a human it very easy to pick out a specific Item. Each post-it note just looks differently. One only would get into trouble when two post-it notes are exactly the same, but then exchanging these Items does not matter;
- structured - the structure of post-it note is very simple, it is just one field: the image of the note. There are however some possibilities to add structure. One could use different coloured notes and/or different shaped notes. One could also divide a note in multiple areas and put specific content in each area. Each area would the work as a different field to a human viewer;
- flexibility - a post-it note does not have much flexibility in the changing of it’s structure. The only thing I can come up with is changing the shape of the note, by cutting pieces of it;
- single - this attribute is about reusability of the Item. Reusability is mostly a digital attribute as copying data is very easy. However in this case one can easily take a post-it note of the window and re-use it in another MacroContent container. This will unfortunately change the original container;
It looks as if the the MicroContent definitions are transferable to meat-space. Only the re-use attribute can be strange. However I did not define this attribute as copy-ability, so it does not break the definition. I am not sure how far this transferability can be stretched, but it shows that also MicroContent has a history in the physical world.