it's kind of far-fetched, i think. ok, i followed your link now, (thanks for introducing me to metaweb usw) but by doing so, i am even more convinced, that the use of the word doesn't have any meaning, beside of jumping on a saddled horse (also marketing people have heard about small pieces, loosely joined). a little bit too many: it is, almost, not really, maybe, ...

i mean why calling it micro? if i learn per day three or 20 vocabularies, would you call it micro? if i sit in a conference, looking at a pp presentation. do they serve me microcontent? if i read one page per day, ... you get the idea. i am missing the concept here. one side promises: by reading wikis and weblogs - and maybe combining them - they would provide me with a tool that would let me understand the world better and than they tell me: its micro.

lets me wonder: do they think about a 5 second brain or what? i thought the web doesn't have to be tv and as i understood small pieces, they didn't mean that either. somehow it leaves a taste of stupidity, while it - maybe - is there to reduce eh - fear¿?.

i think what micro actually stands for can be labeled with: fragmented.

it doesn't help to give an old horse a new name. it certainly doesn't add the beef nor let it find it.

but i know, it was a micro conference ;)

maybe not a 5-second brain, but probably a 5-minute attention span ;-)

at the conference, "microlearning" meant two fairly different things.

- learning from microcontent (...) - i.e. media of the fragmented kind, the fragments usually being small, and
- learning in temporal niches (see p. a. bruck's interpretation).

small content snippets usually can be consumed in small temporal niches (i.e. short time spans) - so those two meanings aren't totally unrelated either. webster defines "micro-" as "related to small quantities"; so while the name may be not the best for either of the two meanings, it's certainly adequate - IMO.

there are lots of absolutely valid questions touching on either meaning; not the least of it - does it make sense to "learn" in such a fashion at all? I think that it's much more fruitful to ask (and try to find answers to) those than to bash the poor little (micro ;-)term - if one is interested in those questions at all.

5 minutes, hombre, you are pure optimistic here. 1'30 is considered as a master piece on tv, if you watch daily news. but it's true, the question is what all that means for learning, as it is called/mixed together with education; - btw, i think bruck had his best time by writing about austrian yellow press - since then i can't take him too serious; anyhow, knowing about my truly fragmented knowledge i got since i am online, i don't have a good feeling about micro, small, tiny, snippets or what ever you wanna call it edu-infotainment. certainly not.

btw yes, i'am interested where this micro, small comes from and what it means, but i can't see how this micro-learning notion should fit into all of these.¡joder! - meant as just coming back home from a latin bar ...

from the fringes: I haven't followed any theoretical debates in this regard, but the "micro-" strikes me as adequate in terms of learning processes that wikis and weblogs can enhance or encourage. I've started to use a weblog for a university course in October (with students having write access, even though they somehow seem reluctant to make use of it), and find that it's extremely useful to post, for discussion, small snips of information - summarise questions and problems, and have these displayed on the screen in class so that meandering discussions can visually return to their starting-point. "micro-" in this context is not only fragmented, but also focused, condensed, in a way. (Perhaps if someone had asked me to put a label on it when I hadn't yet known "micro-", it wouldn't have occured to me, but now that it exists, it does sound appropriate.)

I'm sure there's many more dimensions to micro-learning, but for me it's mainly to do with focus, with offering anchors (or islands) within a larger learning process that stretches over time. A bit like what latin bars do for real life, I guess.

(a bit of micro_ is always good! )

i can imagine its usefull, simply because i wouldn't have to take notes in class anymore. sure, that's a surplus. but i am not so sure about the learning effect. it's another container, easier to find, a collection, but still i define learning somehow different. at least nowadays i need to find a proof not just out of books but from real life. (and sometimes latin bars) its good to have a place to look up, but it is less a place of discussion, feedback and arguments; necessary ingredients i would need to get the feeling of learning. next week there is a conference here, where i will try to get some answers and recheck if i am out of date with my thoughts.