Bite Size Blogging

 Fig 1 Making a meal of data and knowledge

Wales has many firsts in environmental education and a postcard educational database was invented by Welsh teachers in the late 1990s as “Postcards for Our Planet” (POP).  This was a pre INTERNET communication system linking schools in Wales and Portugal.  The objective was to model a global democracy of youth to access leaders with young people’s ideas and concerns about how to ‘rescue’ planet Earth.  It was a postcard version of the citizen’s environmental network proposed in the first UK strategy for sustainable development. The idea was to help young people identify the good and bad things about where they live, then work to improve the bad things and share their ideas, achievements and experiences globally with handmade postcards. 

‘Networking Nature With Postcards’ (NNP) began in the 2010s as a microlearning scheme scheme linking primary and secondary schools in Wales with their European counterparts.    NNP revisits POP.  It is a model in environmental education to encourage people to have empathy for the conservation of wildlife.   This is achieved by individuals telling stories about the environment by combining sight-sized data in pictures, with text to make bite-sized  topics of knowledge that can be assembled into the meal-sized subject of conservation management  (Fig 1). 

In IT, symbols, characters, images, or numbers are data. These are the inputs an IT system needs to process in order to produce a meaningful interpretation. In other words, data in a meaningful form becomes knowledge.

The word topic is used in the sense of ‘branch of knowledge’ or ‘niche. A subject refers to a vast area of a branch of study

Generally speaking, bite-sized e-learning modules are small, self-contained pockets of knowledge called topics. They are shared  with  other topic makers in a microlearning environment; i.e. a classroom or on line.  They typically range in duration from 1 to 15 minutes and are usually focused on one or two tightly defined learning objectives. Here are a few examples.  

We are now in the age dominated by visual information where visual content plays a big role in every part of life. It is estimated that 65 percent of the population are visual learners, so graphics are key to engaging students in eLearning courses. Sight-sized information visuals summarize content in smaller, and easier to process chunks, and when the right visuals are selected to make a bite-sized knowledge nugget, they offer more comprehensibility than text-based explanations or stand alone audios. Also, students effortlessly relate emotions with visuals, which make eLearning courses based on pictures more impactful and memorable than only using text.