Microcontent for microlearning

I was last week in the Microlearning conference in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria. There were many clever and nice people talking about mobile web 2.0, micro content and micro-media, corporate competence development, classrooms without walls, and QR codes. I talked about learning, knowledge building and learning environments.

I learned that microlearning is learning that is enhanced with microcontent (e.g. Nielsen) and micro-media (e.g. Manovich). It’s a bit silly concept, because learning (the process) is never micro, even if you use “small pieces loosely joined” in it.

In my talk I was presenting number of quotations from different sources, people and eras. They were obviously micro content remixed by me. I thought that the quotations I used are probably interesting just like that, too – without my words between them. So, here they are – without any explanations:

“Any true understanding is dialogic in nature.”

– Mikhail Bakhtin 1930s

“All higher [mental] functions originate as actual relations between human individuals.”

– Lev Vygotsky 1930s

“The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing and caring.”

“A good education system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.”

– Ivan Illich 1971

“Image a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”

“We make the Internet not suck”.

– Jimmy Wales 2005

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

– Alan Kay 1971

“Learning environment is a psychological, social, cultural, physical and technological state that favours learning. What kind of physical and technological state you are designing for you and your community?

– Teemu Leinonen 2007 🙂