Microlearning.org

WIRED on "Snack Culture" in TV, print, pop, computer games ...
including dialectical twist by Steven Johnson.

great compendium. blend with Manovich's thoughts on "micromedia" and the "Microchunk It" discussion.

then think about consequences for knowledge & learning.
(and put them in a comment here in this blog ...)

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"So, boosting creativity by providing tools for people to jointly work on Microcontent that is naturally intertwingled is really the main challenge we face with todays Information Management solutions."
Michael Schuster in the SystemOne journal, and here he is adding something on the Memex machine, microcontent and memes.

a blog "about David Weinberger’s book (May, 2007) and how we’re pulling ourselves together now that we’ve blown ourselves to bits." (#). and here is the technorati-tag-list for "small pieces loosely joined".

"But each site is still in many ways like a standalone application. Data inside of one site is contained within a silo. Sure, we can cut and paste text string fragments from here to there, but the excitement on the web these days is all about “structured data” such as Contacts and Profiles, Events and Calendars, and Shopping Carts and Receipts, etc. And in most cases, the structured form of this data, which could be externalized as an XML item or a microformat, generally isn’t. It’s trapped inside the page, relegated to a pretty rendering. So, where’s the clipboard of the web ..."

Ray Ozzie (Microsoft) on Live Clipboard in 2006, reminded via preoccupations-blog

I just noticed that there's also an article on Microlearning in the French Wikipedia. Unfortunately I haven't been speaking - or reading, for that matter - French for quite a while, so I cannot comment on the content itself. It seems to be a translation of the English version, though. If you happen to speak French, let me know what you think.

Tags: Microlearning, Wikipedia.

Ajit Jaokar, just having published the book on "Mobile Web 2.0" and blogging over at Open Gardens, is following a new track of the emerging MicroWeb:

"The World Wide Web, as we know it, is exploding. From its fragments emerges a new 'container-based' Web based on Widgets. For the lack of a better term, I shall call it a 'Widget Widget Web.' ... In keeping with my background, Widget Widget Web will discuss Widgets in context of Mobile Web 2.0 in addition to the Web in general. With the emergence of the full web browsers on mobile devices, there is a natural tendency of web widgets to 'cross the chasm' to the mobile web."

Read more here.

... links to two presentations and two research papers extending the subject of micromedia / microinformation / microlearning:

[1] Presentations:
A rather visual, bullet-point free presentation on micromedia. And another one (earlier, in parts identical) more focusing on microlearning.

[2] Research papers:
Use These Tools, Your Mind Will Follow (On Micromedia and Microlearning), ALT-C 2006 research paper.

Designing for the Microcosmos. Human-centered Design for 'Casual' Information and Learning in Micromedia Environments. Research paper for M3, a HCI conference in Vienna. Accepted, but still kinda draft, with my excuses to native speakers for me mistreating the language. at least some of this will be corrected soon.

Martin Lindner reports on the ALT-C conference 2006 by the Association for Learning Technology, and Arnaud Leene responds.

The best resource on the economic implications micromedia-phenomenon (incl. Web 2.0, Attention Economy and sociocultural implications) is, of course, Umair Haque's www.bubblegeneration.com. Here's the Google search for "atomized" on bubblegeneration, leading to statements relevant for the microcontent paradigm shift that is so important for the microlearning/microknowledge concept.

3 bits of a blog post that goes from wikis to microcontent in general (on exceler8ion, a blog dealing with "the world of interactive advertising"). [For an explanation of the microcontent-concept see Arnaud's web-essay.]

"Almost everything we do in our information economy jobs is about microcontent. We don’t write papers in business anymore, we don’t do full research studies, we guestimate 95% of the time, we don’t often run fully integrated advertising campaigns, and we don’t watch all of the TV show. We don’t usually digest much of anything these days in huge gulps other than stress. Instead we take sips from a thousand different wine glasses each day and swirl the wine around in our mouths trying to identify the ingredients so we can understand them, appreciate them, and find out which ones are worth swallowing. [...]

Ross [Mayfield, of socialtext] was the first person I heard that used the term ‘occupational spam’ to define how people had begun seeing productivity losses because all they did was answer e-mail. Worse, people who were using e-mail to manage critical work, even small pieces of it (and yes we all are), were constantly stressing over missing important information burried in their inbox and then having to deal with the consequences. [...]

There’s a chap named Jeremy Ruston who took the Wiki concept and adapted it to what he defines as ‘microcontent.’ In the same way that you don’t always write a full story on a blog, or a full letter in an e-mail you have microcontent. So he shaped a Wiki in a fashion that would best help him corral microcontent and called it a TiddlyWiki."

[Exactly: That is the situation for which we want to find an answer with Microlearning. And our Micro-Blog, of course, is based on the fabulous TiddlyWiki, now in version 2.]