Top 100 Tools for Learning

Jane Hart has recently published her list of the Top 100 tools For Learning for 2008. Jane’s list is compiled from the contributions of 155 learning professionals (from both education and workplace learning) who shared their Top 10 Tools for Learning both for their own personal learning/ productivity and for creating learning solutions for others. You can search the individual top ten lists that were contributed also.

The list ranks the top 100, comparing their 2008 rank with where they came in for 2007. No huge surprises at the top of the table, with del.icio.us and Firefox swapping positions this year at 1 and 2, and as expected the top positions are sprinkled with blog and wiki applications, search tools, and various communications tools such as skype for instance. Interesting to note that Twitter has risen to 17= from 43rd last year, showing how rapidly a relative newcomer to the social networking world can rise in popularity.

It’s when you get down the list a bit that there are some interesting applications that appear – for instance, Voicethread, an application for creating collaborative slideshows appears at 24=, PageFlakes at 31 and SecondLife at 41 – none of which appeared in the top 100 last year.

As you work down the list there are a number of applications that I’m not familiar with, many of which do things that other applications I already use do – all of which goes to demonstrate what a rapidly developing field the world of web2.0 and online education is.

I am encouraged to see that eXe has risen from 72nd place last year to 52=. Thanks to Jane for publishing her list again this year!

BTW – if the applications on Jane’s list aren’t enough for you, check out the list of applications in the OpenSocialDirectory – that should keep you buys for a few rainy weekends to come 🙂