It’s time again for Jane Hart’s Top Learning Tools Survey, so it’s time for my personal list (and for you to submit yours). Here goes!
- WordPress: my first learning tool is this blog. Here’s where I lay out my ideas. The learning comes from just me thinking through things to keep populating the post, and the exercise of actually putting the thoughts down. And of course from comments, whether here or as often happens, on LinkedIn.
- OmniGraffle: a lot of thinking comes from reflection, both with the blog for thoughts, and through diagramming my understanding. Diagrams allow us to map conceptual relationships to spatial ones to facilitate comprehension.
- OmniOutliner: another way I think is in outlines.
- Word: I do most of my writing besides blogging in Word. This includes my Quinnsights column for Learning Solutions and my posts for the Litmos blog. And, of course, books. For the latter, in particular, the outlining features in Word are a necessity for me.
- Pagico: This is a project management tool, and I have entries for all the projects and groups I work with. I also through in random ToDos. I’m not as good with it as I’d like, but it helps keep ideas from not getting explored.
- Slack: I work with a number of groups, and one in particular really benefits from the social interaction Slack provides between meetings.
- Zoom: I use both Blue Jeans and Zoom, but I use Zoom more, as it has chats with my ITA colleagues, as well as video conversations with folks.
- Twitter: Of course, Twitter is a way to have debates, as I recently found out, as well as chats (c.f. #lrnchat and #guildchat). There’s also a steady stream of the latest news.
- DuckDuckGo: I’ve largely replaced Google for search, but search (and Wikipedia) are powerful learning opportunities.
- Social media (read: LinkedIn/Facebook): places where I hang with my colleagues, ask questions, and see what dialogs are going on.
Those are a partial list of my learning tools. What’re yours?
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