The Microlearning Meetup Newsletter #9
Education + Entertainment
In June 1973, Arthur C. Clarke gave a speech to IBMers. In the speech he said:
"The greatest single industry of the future will be education.
The second greatest will be entertainment.
I think the two should be synonymous."
It is interesting that Clarke brought together education and entertainment. We are living in a time when we have literally at our fingertips access to a multitude of screen-based entertainment that encompasses everything from user-generated content through to professional studios - TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, Prime, iPlayer, SnapChat, Instagram etc. We are able to interact with this content - like, dislike, comment, share - at precisely the moment the content triggers some kind of reaction in us. We can laugh with it, cry with it, cringe at it, hate it; we can do it with 'friends' and strangers. And we can watch it again and again and again, not the whole movie, but literally the 5 second clip that made an impression on us.
This type of screen-based entertainment has the potential to engage us, allow us to interact with it, and analyse to the nth degree the rich layers of data beneath it. If even the most mundane aspects of life, captured for posterity in a 10 second TikTok have the potential to engage thousands of viewers and elicit some kind of reaction from them, then why wouldn't I try to understand how to apply these principles of entertainment to education, whilst ensuring that the educational element was underpinned by evidenced-based approaches to learning?
Enjoy The Microlearning Meetup newsletter.
The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are mine, and are in no way connected to my employer, or any individuals or companies that may be mentioned in this newsletter.
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1. WHAT'S ON
ATD, May 21 - 24, in San Diego features a number of in-person, virtual and on-demand sessions on microlearning.
May 20
May 22
Recommended by LinkedIn
Making Microlearning Work for Your Organization, Robyn A. Defelice, PhD
May 23
May 24
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2. RECORDINGS & INTERESTING READS
The Benefits of Microlearning with 7 Taps, from the Digital Learning Institute, with Kate Udalova , discussing the 7taps Microlearning platform and in particular the addition of AI to the 7Taps platform.
Interesting post from Mert Tutenkan sharing his thoughts about the power of minimalism and elearning and its importance for the brain: less is more!
Case study about how Inova Health Systems used microlearning - How Inova Taught 2,000 Managers To Lead Using ‘Four Key Moments’. They used the 7Taps platform, and this is a post by 7Taps about it - Delivering on-the-go learning to healthcare professionals
Jason Gulya has created a microlearning chatbot called - microchat. Click here to find out more about it. To try it out click on this link - microchat 2. Apparently Microchat 1 was having some teething problems, and was decommissioned.
Worth flicking through some of the papers from Micromedia and Corporate Learning, Proceedings of the 3rd International Microlearning 2007 Conference. Obviously the world has changed since then, but some interesting papers and topics, but also just getting a sense of the thinking back then towards microlearning.
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LINKS FOR THE MICROLEARNING MEETUP: