http://blogsurvey.media.mit.edu

Tags: MIT, Survey, Blogging

Martin Lindner asked me to summarize our idea how to tag our content about Microlearning 2005 and BlogWalk 9.0, so that we can stay in touch, develop new ideas and maintain a web-based discourse on the topics.

At the end of BlogWalk 9.0, we came to the conclusion that it would make sense to tag photos, postings, links and so on with both "Microlearning" and "Microlearning2005", or "Blogwalk" and "Blogwalk9", respectively. This enables people to choose if they want to see all Blogwalk photos, or just photos from Blogwalk 9.0.

You can tag your photos with Flickr, Buzznet or 23people, for example.

It is also possible to tag any blog post, regardless of the blogging system, if your blog gets indexed by Technorati. Just use Technorati Tags to tag your posts. This is how it is done: At the end of your blog posting, just insert the following code for any tag you'd like to include: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/YourTagHere" rel="tag">YourTagHere</a>.

So, if you'd want to tag your posts with "Microlearning", "Microlearning2005", "BlogWalk", and "Blogwalk9" like I am doing now, you would use <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Microlearning" rel="tag">Microlearning</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Microlearning2005" rel="tag">Microlearning2005</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/BlogWalk" rel="tag">BlogWalk</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Blogwalk9" rel="tag">Blogwalk9</a>

You can also use a bookmarklet for tagging your posts, so you don't have to enter all that code. Just drag & drop this bookmarklet to your browser and click it in order to enter your tags: Technorati Tags Bookmarklet. Seperate different tags with spaces.

Each of Technorati's Tag Pages also has an RSS feed which is publicly available and contains all the posts. Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to the del.icio.us and flickr tag feeds seperately, because the Technorati feeds only show weblog postings.

You can also generate RSS feeds with keywords instead of tags. This means that you will also find entries which use the term "microlearning" in the posting, for example, even if they are not tagged with that term. Just like a technorati search. In order to do this, you'd have to get an account at Technorati and add these terms to your watchlist, and you'll get an RSS feed then. I already did this for the terms "Microlearning" (RSS) and "BlogWalk" (RSS), so you can just use these liberated feeds without having to register.

Tags: Microlearning, Microlearning2005, BlogWalk, BlogWalk9, Tagging.

I just uploaded my photos from Microlearning 2005 and BlogWalk 9.0 into a Flickr photo set: Innsbruck 2005.

Tags: Microlearning, Microlearning2005, BlogWalk, BlogWalk9, Innsbruck, Austria.

I just came back from Microlearning 2005 and BlogWalk 9.0 in Innsbruck last night, where I stayed from Wednesday until Sunday. It was great to be there, and I hope to meet a lot of people again next year at Microlearning 2006! I also hope to collaborate with Research Studios Austria in the future, in some way or the other. They really are onto something.

Thanks to Martin Lindner, Theo Hug and Peter Bruck for asking me to come! It was great to meet Sebastian Fiedler and Chris Langreiter again, and I also got to know Michael Schuster (twoday.net), Roger Fischer (kaywa.ch), Seb Paquet, Bryan Alexander, Arnaud Leene, Norm Friesen, Hagen Graf, Andrea Handl, Renate Millebner, Patricia Köll, Wolf Hilzensauer, Gernot Tscherteu, Junichi Azuma, Bruno Haid and many others.

I found both the discussions and presentations on MicroContent and MicroLearning as well as the social networking very rewarding, and hope that we will not stop here but transform and establish this discourse on the web. I will write more about this later, I just need some time to let things settle a bit.

Tags: Microlearning, Microlearning2005, BlogWalk, BlogWalk9.

Here is a draft of my paper for the Microlearning 2005 conference: Self directed learning with personal publishing and microcontent - constructivist approach and insights for institutional implementations (PDF). Your feedback is very welcome, please let me know what you think! (Abstract)

Tags: Microlearning, Microcontent, Constructivism

Arnaud Leene published the second version of his paper for Microlearning 2005: MicroContent is everywhere (v0.2) [PDF]. (Here's my comment on the first one).

Tags: MicroContent, Microlearning

Sébastien Paquet (National Research Council Canada) and Sebastian Fiedler (University of Augsburg) published their text for Microlearning 2005:

Abstract
The Web is rapidly evolving towards a much more dynamic and broadly participative medium. In the Web 2.0, everyone can, and many people indeed do, become creators. Content from a rapidly widening array of sources becomes available as digital flows of reusable/remixable objects. In this context, learners are empowered to create personal learning environments. This contribution seeks to illustrate through concrete examples how this is happening, and tease out salient implications of this transition: learning becomes networked and personalized; valuable learning resources become increasingly easy to find; and collaborative, constructivist learning is enabled.

Read more [via Arnaud Leene]

Tags: Microlearning, Constructivism

Martin Lindner just emailed me the preliminary conference program (PDF) for the Microlearning 2005 conference, just in case you are interested. I'll be speaking on friday morning (11.00-12.30), I guess. I might upload a draft of my paper soon (abstract).

Tags: Microlearning

Arnaud Leene pointed to TagCloud.com. It is a service which automagically generates tag clouds from any number of rss feeds specified. The tags are generated from the system, based on keywords from Yahoo search.

The system seems to work well with english content, but does not return very good results with the german feeds I tried. There's a new option to define "stop words", though, which can be filtered and ommited from the tag cloud. Another thing is that the system seems not to be able to deal with international characters like ä, ü, ö and so on when they are HTML-encoded.

I really like the approach this service takes, though. I'm just wondering why they generate all tags through Yahoo search keywords. Many posts already are tagged, either through the use of Technorati tags or through one or more categories (which mostly are also specified in the rss-feed through <category> or <dc:subject>). I'd like the system to take these tags into account as well.

Here's a tag cloud just for this blog's feed:


Tags: Tagging, TagCloud

BlogWalk 9.0 will take place in Innsbruck on June 25th, 2005 (the day after Microlearning 2005).

BlogWalk is a series of face-to-face meetings aimed to bring together weblog researchers and practitioners for in-depth conversations about their work, possible trends, and visions. The format we strive for is an intellectual Salon where minds can meet and inspire each other in direct conversation.

About BlogWalk - BlogWalk 9 Wiki Page

See also my postings on BlogWalk 2.0: 'The role of personal Webpublishing for self-organized and informal learning', BlogWalk 2, Reflections.

Tags: BlogWalk, Microlearning, Innsbruck

I know that this weblog doesn't have too many readers, but I just edited my blog template and included hyperlinks for saving & tagging each individual blog post with del.icio.us (inspired by A VC).

Furthermore, I've included a hyperlink for an URL search with del.icio.us, which searches for the blog post's permalink URL, and shows if and how it has been tagged. This is in the format del.icio.us/url?url=http://example.com (RSS: del.icio.us/rss/url?url=http://example.com).

Just look for the "Tag this" and "View tags" hyperlinks below each posting.

This is an interesting function, because it lets other users assign tags to other blogger's postings, based on their individual understanding of the content and what it means to them. I'm just trying this out here, so give it a shot.

To see how this could work, have a look at tag searches for an example text which is well-known and has already been tagged by a few people:
Clay Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

• Tag search with del.icio.us
• Tag search with furl.net

I'm not sure if this makes much sense out in the open, but I think it could be of value in educational blogging scenarios, maybe with a self-hosted social bookmarks manager like Scuttle, which has been released as open-source under the GPL.

Tags: Tagging, del.icio.us, MicroContent, Microlearning

I have just found Roger Fischer's (kaywa.ch) abstract on Microlearning with Mobile Weblogs (.doc format, have a look at google's cached HTML version for a nonproprietary format) in the "Education-Moblog der Pädagogischen Hochschule Rorschach":

The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today. A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known knowledge at the point of application. When knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.

Tags: Microlearning, MobileLearning, Moblogs

Dr. Arnaud Leene (MicroContent Musings), who is also going to be at Microlearning 2005, published a first draft of his paper: "MicroContent is Everywhere" (PDF).

I think it is a good point that he mentions how microcontent gets structured through the use of metadata, calling it Structured Microcontent. Very interesting is the lifecycle of microcontent items he describes: creation, storage, publication, viewing, changing and removing. The line between publication and viewing seems to be very thin, and I would like to add that viewing can also go further, when it comes to collaborative interaction. Somebody who views a microcontent item is not likely to be able (allowed) to change it, but she might be given various options on how to add to a microcontent item (for example by leaving a comment, sending a trackback, or assigning a tag).

When the creator of a microcontent item makes any changes on the item, these changes should be detectable by any viewer, writes Leene. I couldn't agree more, but I'd say that this is hardly the case. Implementations which might already work are notifications of changes in weblog-items though RSS (most readers don't highlight the changes, though) or a wiki page's version history.

One last question which came to my mind is if microcontent can be unstructured at all, and if metadata is a requirement for microcontent (I think it possibly is).

Tags: MicroContent, Metadata

Google doesn't seem to have any definitions on Microcontent or Microlearning, and Wikipedia does not have any entries for Microcontent and Microlearning, either. Maybe we should start publishing definitions and developing these wiki pages?

Microcontent is not too hard to explain, but Microlearning is not as easy to define as it may seem. I will try to find good definitions, starting with Microcontent for now, and post them here. Please do comment if you know any other!

Anil Dash provided a "new" definition in 2002:

Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use to view digital content today. We've discovered in the last few years that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet. So it's time to create a tool that's designed for the job of viewing, managing, and publishing microcontent. This tool is the microcontent client. [...]
Today, microcontent is being used as a more general term indicating content that conveys one primary idea or concept, is accessible through a single definitive URL or permalink, and is appropriately written and formatted for presentation in email clients, web browsers, or on handheld devices as needed.

magazine: Introducing the Microcontent Client

Nova Spivack wrote in 2003:

Microcontent is "small content." That is, small, granular pieces of content, each with an unique identity and URI, that may be published, subscribed to, and linked across the network.
Examples of microcontent include typical Weblog postings, RSS/Atom posts, discussion postings, Wiki nodes, or database records that have their own URI's. [...]
How essential is metadata to microcontent? Can microcontent exist without containing metadata or is metadata the key to microcontent? In my definition above I suggest that metadata is a requirement of microcontent, but that may or may not be the case. Is the definition of microcontent merely that it is "small content" or is it "small self-describing content"?

Minding the Planet: Defining Microcontent

In 2004, Arnaud Leene defined MicroContent as "an extremly small (piece of) information in computer data format". Microcontent Musings: Definition of Microcontent.

As Marc Canter already stated, every piece of microcontent must have a unique URL, the permalink. This allows others to syndicate the microcontent. Note that this will exclude a lot of content. For instance if I add a blogroll to weblog, but do not offer it also as a separate URL, it is not Microcontent. Although it could be.

Microcontent Musings: Characteristics

Martin Lindner posts a definiton of microcontent from TiddlyWiki:

MicroContent being a fashionable word for self-contained fragments of content that are typically smaller than entire pages. Often MicroContent is presented via some kind of aggregation that reduces the perceptual shock and resource cost of context switching (eg Blogs aggregating several entries onto a page or Flickr presenting photos in an album).

mediatope II: Microcontent, definition by TiddlyWiki

What are your thoughts on Microcontent, or do you know another valuable definition? Please let me know.

Tags: Microlearning, Microcontent