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10 Jun 2006
MicroContent or not?
That is the question.
I had the opportunity to present a definition of MicroContent at the beginning of the conference. And some people referred back to me when they were talking about the Content they are using with.
Thomas Grüebler and Magnus Rembold from Germany were busy creating an education environment for theatre students. In this environment they used video's of three types (theory, discussion, practice). And the environment forced the users to watch the video's in a certain order. First the theory video, then the discussion video and then the practice video. And naturally this implied also video sequences. In the discussion video that followed the theory video, that theory should be discussed. And similar for the practice video's.
Naturally they called these video's MicroContent, as I did in definition talk. However it is not that clear cut. Their video's are not self-contained. Although one can watch the video, the full meaning is not transmitted. Pieces are lacking. These video's are samples, fragments. But interestingly they offered multiple tracks through these fragments in order to highlight certain points f the theory.
The company led by Daniel Purlich from France is busy creating small pieces of content for teaching purposes, which they call knowledge pills. One could compare these pills with a long WikiPedia page, although they seemed to have cut it into multiple pages. And this pills were specifically created for education purposes and have therefor a much different structure than a WikiPedia page.
Naturally he likened these pills to MicroContent. I did not yet check it out, but I do not think I would call these MicroContent. The fact that the content is divided over multiple web-pages, no longer makes them self-contained. It will be difficult to exchange and share pills. But one could call that a format problem. If they would have selected the PDF-format, they could sell their pills through the iTunes DocumentStore. Or start a PDF-casting feed.
The other thing is they structure. When they talk about structure, they mean the way the pill is written. One should first have an intro, then the theory, then examples, etc, etc. This is what I usually do not mean by structure. It has for instance no use to offer a search into the intro field only. Whereas in structured content, search into separate fields might be essential. So not all structure is MicroContent structure. Anyway if they add useful metadata (and especially tags) to their knowledge pills, I will be the first to call it MicroContent.
The lesson for me is that I should be more clear about what structure means in the usage of a MicroContent Item. And it is easy to mistake samples/quotes/fragments for MicroContent.