Upside Learning Blog » Social Learning

Growth In Formal Learning

Abhijit Kadle — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:56:40 +0000

There has been a lot of talk about informal and social learning vs. formal learning. There is so much about it on the internet, that we wonder sometimes if formal learning has any sort of place in the future of learning at all. The fact hasn’t change, formal learning will exist in the future. There are a variety of reasons for it; but let’s just quickly delve into it a bit. With service industries ending up as major consumers of learning, the focus on knowledge is more pronounced, I sometimes feel it is the one key influence affecting the level of service a company can offer and profit from. The knowledge life-cycle is shortening, in some cases, products such as cars took five years or more to develop and roll-out. Today, most major car companies have a design cycle that rarely exceed 24 months for production models. This effectively means the knowledge acquired and implemented on a car platform is useful only during the production cycle for that car. What happens to the expertise after; I’m sure there are some principles that carry through to other projects, but a bulk of the learning around design must be discarded when working with the next platform. Regardless of whether you are creating virtual services and products or tangible ‘touch and feel’ products, you have to do more, faster and cheaper. In my mind, I directly equate this with needing more formal training.

Social, informal, networked learning takes time to evolve in the workplace. As a training department, there is little you can do but provide the tools. While there are experts out there helping corporates ’strategize’ about creating a culture of learning and sharing, whether it’ll work depends on the culture in your workplace, how learning/sharing is rewarded and deemed relevant, and most importantly if the organization can provide the time it requires for humans to nurture the relationships required for ’social or informal’ learning. The way I see it, lots of organizations have neither the culture nor the time to attempt implementing and hoping to succeed using such methods. Formal learning on the other hand is top down in its approach, and let’s you actually plan for knowledge obsolescence. One way that social/informal learning works is by co-opting SMEs into your personal learning network. In a age where knowledge quickly becomes obsolete, who can claim to be an ‘expert’? this holds especially true in the information technology and enabled services area. In a mature industry, such as automobile manufacture, there are truly individuals who have mastered certain areas of knowledge, these can truly claim to be SMEs. This leads me to partially believe that social/informal learning would work better in more mature industries.

Point is – as knowledge becomes obsolete rapidly, the need to disseminate large volumes of information that must be learned quickly only increases. While documenting this knowledge and making it available over the network helps, having a top-down mandated training program to impart that knowledge becomes more important. As we see more and more businesses migrate to models that obsolete information at a fair clip, the need for formal training programs, but web-based and instructor-led will only grow. Do you think so too?

Social Networking – A Contrarian View

Abhijit Kadle — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 10:26:56 +0000

Today, I’m going to adopt a contrarian view. We all know social networks promote learning; while the mechanisms aren’t documented or well-understood, that it works isn’t in doubt anymore. But we must ask, are the ‘social media/networking systems’ out there promoting this learning? Or does it happen in spite of these systems? Sure, lots of companies want to replicate ‘Facebook’ behind the firewall; safe from prying eyes, but open enough for employees to freely express themselves. They hope that by just implementing such a system learning will ‘happen’; does it?

I have seen that early attempts to bring social networking inside companies as a work tool have failed. They probably failed because they didn’t really have a focus on the companies’ true ethos – making money. Perhaps they lacked the required understanding of business processes, the systems used to enable these and the ‘culture’ that each company develops over time. Social networks are about connecting people, about creating an ‘ambient awareness’ of what’s happening and where with reference to the people around us. Such networks come into their own when you want to find people who can help you solve problems, provide insights, or provide expertise you may not have.

Given the way social networking tools are at this time, connecting people is the easy part – the systems facilitate the connections easily and effectively. But how does one track the data exchange and activity on these systems to glean usable knowledge (further solves problem, provides an insight or expertise) – it is only this knowledge that people are interested in – knowledge that affects business process execution, social networking tools as we know it fail miserably in this area. People need to be motivated to change, and that isn’t going to happen overnight. Social technologies are going to take time to be adopted, just like it too years before people thought email.

Till that time, I wouldn’t be relying on them for much more than connecting and communicating, another tool like IM, video chat, VoIP etc. This of course, does not mean that you ignore the potential of such tools/platforms/systems. In the years to come, as people change their attitude and mind-sets about the tools, they are sure to have an impact. Has your organization implemented a social networking platform? What’s been your experience?

Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Learning And Social Networks

Abhijit Kadle — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 09:39:31 +0000

Google Plus is making waves among technology savvy social networkers. Like so many other Google products, this one is in beta and is gradually opening up to more users. One unique aspect separates Plus from other Google services. Unlike Facebook or Twitter where one accesses the ‘firehose’ of data that one subscribes to and is dependent on the Friends/Following, and where users mostly use features like groups/lists etc to sort out noise from the stream, Plus uses a different approach and lets users create ‘circles’ that allow them to separate streams. This is a more manageable approach for dealing with the humongous amount of incoming data that social networks generate.

When Google Plus started out, it was already ’seeded’ with a large number of individuals who were already working on the concurrent development of the service. Since invitations were sent out from these accounts, the adoption of Plus propagated much faster through the web application/service development community. For now, it remains a geeky sort of place. As an early user, none of my ‘real’ social network peers were on it yet and it made me follow a large number of Google product engineering folks, developers from other companies, and technology journalists and yes, I also follow Mark Zuckerberg, who it seems is the most ‘followed’ person on Plus right now. Ironic that. The early user group was so technology driven and because of that, they were able to offer large amounts of bug reporting and constructive feedback to Google about the evolving feature set. It was great to see how Google’s engineers solicited feedback, which they got almost instantaneously and were able to act on it quickly. This interaction made it quite clear that Google was responsive to the limited user groups suggestions.

With individuals like Vic Gundotra and other senior engineering staff starting ‘hangouts’ (essentially video conference forums open to anyone who happens to be around at the time) users got a unique opportunity to interact with some superb engineering talent. I’m quite sure the engineers also benefit tremendously from such interaction with end-users, which would otherwise not have been possible. It led me to wonder about the evolving nature of such web services and applications. For perhaps the first time in the history of design, a large groups of users can influence the shape/form of a service they use. While designers always consider the user of a product/service, the scope/scale of interaction with users possible now was unheard of just a decade ago. Back then, as is now, designers depend a lot on ‘research’ to make design decisions. But I’m digressing, so without ever intending to learn from using Plus, I ended up learning several things mostly around:

Insights into how Google’s engineering folk think about web service/application development.

Observing the evolution of a web application’s feature set and the implications of the change for the user community.

Seeing Google’s responses to opinions within the user community and how they prioritized requests was interesting to watch too.

It’s quite clear to me now how social networks could influence learning by:

Providing a digital space for free expression about the work and workplace

Creating a forum for interaction around the knowledge expressed

Providing a sense of community and common purpose

Providing the ability to observe and participate in tasks with other more experienced individuals

Creating an environment where feedback is quick, almost in real-time, and could come from disparate parts of the networks, this offers users unique perspectives

Providing a system that encourages and rewards discovery and contribution, and where emergence clearly marks important/linchpin users or important content

Encouraging moments of serendipitous learning, or rather, providing a digital space for such learning serendipity to grow and thrive

Now if only organizations understood that such networks could be critical to learning and in turn survival.

Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Google Plus: Initial Impressions

Abhijit Kadle — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 08:03:52 +0000

It’s been quite an interesting week on the Google front, with the launch of one new service after another. The one making the biggest waves (if you pardon the pun) has been Google+ (plus). Having wrangled an invite, I used it for a couple of hours. These are some first impressions.

It shouldn’t be surprising that I’m making lots of comparison to Facebook which is the defacto social networking standard right now.

What’s cool:

The hangout feature is the clear differentiator – multi user video conferencing, ability to share media, and VERY COOL is the ability to watch media clips together as a group! It also switches ‘attention’ depending on what’s happening in the conversation, that’s awesome too.
Circles is a great way of organizing and separating feeds; unlike Facebook’s fire-hose in your face approach. Also the group management user interface and experience is far better than anything Facebook offers.
A new profile feature that will probably replace Google’s current profile (I am not sure about this though)
The +1 I figure will eventually end up deep inside Google’s ecosystem and will be included in the page-rank algorithm; it ties very well to their core business of search, a million individuals working with the +1 button might give Google the edge in providing human context to search.
Sparks – the content search mechanism is unlike anything I’ve seen; enter an interest into the box and Google fetches web elements that might be related to the interest. You can create an interest list in this way, adding stuff you like as you go along.
Huddle – this was something I was looking for; finally a group messaging system that works across Android, iPhone, and SMS.
User interface and user experience are unlike any other Google service I’ve used so far – quite simple and intuitive; it is evident Google has spent significant time and money working this out for Plus.

Some questions that came to my mind were:

What about integration with twitter, google reader and other web services?
What about the data, will there be an API in the near future?
How will this evolve, considering Google’s products seem to be in a continuous beta?

Does it compare to Facebook? I’d say yes, will the masses leave Facebook and embrace +(Plus)? That’s hard question to answer at this point, time will tell. Have you tried it? Will this make a better tool for learning than Facebook is?

Leave comments please.

Top 100 Tools For Learning 2010 – C4LPT Survey

Amit Garg — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 09:56:06 +0000

The final list of top 100 tools for learning for 2010 is now out on Jane Hart’s website. I understand this list is more inclined towards tools that learning professionals use for their own learning as opposed to those used for creating learning programs or training sessions. I see great gains made by some of the tools while I have not even experienced them as yet.

A quick look at the top 10:

Twitter – micro-updating tool
YouTube – video hosting and sharing tool
GoogleDocs – online collaboration tool
Delicious – social bookmarking tool
Slideshare – presentation hosting and sharing tool
Skype – instant messaging and VoIP call tool
Google Reader – RSS feed reader
Wordpress – blogging tool
Facebook – social networking site
Moodle – course management system

Some observations:

The top 10 is like a who’s who of social and informal learning tools. The complete list has a very strong bias towards social tools. This skew is probably because the people who participate in this survey are those at the cutting edge of information technology tools and are also socially more active on the web. I believe this list does not apply equally well for the average employee at the workplace; but there’s no doubting social and informal learning tools are on the rise. It’s time for L&D to take notice and start including these components in their learning mix.
As many as 18 new tools on the list this year indicates new tools are coming up (or becoming popular) every year. Get ready to discard some old tools and try out new ones. On my list to try out soon are Jing, Glogster, Voicethread, Animoto, Zotero & ipadio
Camtasia Studio, Adobe Captivate, Articulate still feature in top 50 – though all of them have dropped positions as compared to last year. Notably, Adobe Flash suffers a steep drop and I wonder if this is a reflection of the difficult economic times we have seen in last 18-24 months. We have seen clients choosing rapid development tools over custom Flash built solutions purely for cost reasons.

Here’s the slide share presentation giving an overview of the full list of 100 tools.

Top100 Tools for Learning 2010

Elements For Constructing Social Learning Environments

Abhijit Kadle — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:39:59 +0000

Everyone’s been talking about Social Learning Environments (SLEs), the internet offers a plethora of tools that could become a part of a SLE. While some of these tools cost money, the bulk of them are free. We can construct our very SLE using these free tools. Jane Hart wrote about ‘How to Create a Social Learning Environment’ in the November 09 issue of Inside Learning Technologies. She covered the major tools that can be used to create a Social Learning Environment for free or at a low cost.

Click Image to Enlarge.

There are a huge number of social media tools and services available, the ones mentioned here come from Jane’s list of Top 100 tools for learning of 2009, compiled from numerous contributions from the world over. It was an elegant way to describe the components of a SLE and the tools that can be used for it. We chose to convert it into a graphic to show those components and tools at a glance.

Feel free to use this graphic in any of your communication. Let us know if you find it useful, or think something can be changed.

Mobile Learning Development at Upside

Abhijit Kadle — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:29:20 +0000

With our focus on mobile learning, we’re constantly attempting to address the multifarious platforms in the mobile technology space.
These days, phones are sophisticated, and some come with operating systems that allow for installation and removal of applications on the device. While this is a common and accepted paradigm on computers, its still relatively novel for mobile devices. Mobile devices in the past came with fixed features that couldn’t be altered, and a user had to make do with the functionality that shipped with the device. In the future, all phones will have sophisticated operating systems, sensors, and connectivity; developing applications for those will be different from typical eLearning as is seen on desktop computers.

We’ve been developing applications for the iPhone and Blackberry; and we’ve just started Android development too. Exciting times for us, to share some of what we’ve been doing, we’ve uploaded one of our test applications to the App Store – The Soccer Quiz. While this is rudimentary quiz application, we’re working on other applications that will function as learning tools. You can download the Soccer Quiz for free and try it out.

The LMS and SNS – A Fine Balance

Abhijit Kadle — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:32:02 +0000

That the LMS needs to incorporate social learning elements is no longer a point of debate but both a question of survival for the LMS itself and also a test of how the LMS handles the balance of both the elements of training and the ‘networkedness’ of the social learning. We’ve been hearing of experts commenting that LMSs today don’t come with appropriate social media technology built in.

We’d like to differ; the UpsideLMS comes with a unique social learning framework that lets users actually access such social tools from within the LMS in a robust and secure environment for connecting to and sharing with fellow users. Letting users move beyond routine training, into actual personal development.

The system is geared to offer the human face required for social interactions. Users can build an elaborate social network by adding individuals in the enterprise they interact with regularly as friends. This network built over time stretches beyond the departmental or working unit boundaries; eventually resulting in knowledge sharing across multiple channels in the enterprise.

Key to the social experience of using the UpsideLMS is the ability to add other users as friends and followers. Extensive support for internal micro-blogging to quickly connect users with their network of friends and followers through a series of short status messages about work and life. The constant feed of messages makes the LMS alive and alert.

Recently, Twitter has emerged as a fast growing and influential social networking service. It’s also been known for being leveraged as a great life and learning tool. To harness this already powerful network, the UpsideLMS offers a Twitter widget that lets users access their Twitter streams from within the LMS interface.

Communities are a recurring theme in UpsideLMS, as we believe all the tools we provide aid the organization to build communities that are alive, constantly sharing knowledge and learning as a result. One of the key features of social networks is the spontaneous forming of communities around shared interests and concerns. The UpsideLMS now gives users the ability to create and participate in such communities, letting users share their knowledge and expertise with others in their community. This sense and place of community is a powerful force that can drive learning in the enterprise.

While we are not implementing user generated content and peer rating in the current version of the system, while I’ll admit we are experimenting with such features. It already exists in parts with users able to rate curricula and as an experimental feature to rate videos as well. Such features let the social framework truly come to fruition by supporting emergence – good content and experts will come to the fore. This result of using a social framework brings the organization most value. Our development of these features is going according to plan and we should be able to offer customers these in the first week of March. We’ll post a detailed follow-up post showing how those features work for those who’re interested.

The social learning framework provides a unique way to capture the various types of knowledge that are prevalent in the enterprise. It goes beyond the conventional view of courseware, assignments and assessment, but is fundamental to an Enterprise and its employees’ success. This does not mean however, that the UpsideLMS ignores conventional training delivery as it offers an excellent hybrid of conventional learning management and a social learning framework.

I’d love to hear views from other LMS developers and users who have seen social learning elements being incorporated in other LMS systems. We’re constantly looking to improve the feature set UpsideLMS offers, your comments are valuable.

Social Media Libraries for Flash

Yogesh Agarwal — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:25:54 +0000

As social technology growth continues to march on and dynamic learning grows to be the need of the day, it is little surprise that social media has now become an integral part of learning as well.

Various elearning development companies are integrating the popular social media services like Twitter, YouTube etc. right into their courses and LMS. A couple of months back, the Adobe Captivate blog demonstrated a twitter widget that can be integrated within a Captivate Flash output to send a tweet (as questions/suggestions/comments etc.) about the content of a learning module and get answers/opinions from others following the course tag. This is just one example. The options, however, are multifold.

These social media elements can also be integrated in the elearning courses or applications developed using Flash technologies. There are many Flash/ActionScript libraries available for this purpose, some of which are listed below.

1. Twitter – There are many libraries available for Twitter integration. The complete list can be found at Twitter API wiki. Below are two of the commonly used ActionScript libraries –

a. Tweetr – This is one of the most commonly used twitter ActionScript 3.0 libraries. It’s up to date and has support of the new Twitter features like retweet and lists. Moreover, it boasts of a PHP proxy class that can be used to overcome the cross domain issues of Flash. This library has good documentation and tutorials and also supports URL shortening.

b. TwitterScript – This is the one of the ActionScript 3.0 libraries that has been created in the early days of Twitter by Twitter itself. However, they open sourced it later for the ease of updating. This library hasn’t been updated since March 2009 and hence doesn’t include support for the new Twitter features like lists and retweet.

2. Facebook – The most commonly used class for Facebook integration is facebook-actionscript-api. Developed by Adobe and Facebook, this API is fully supported by both. Adobe’s developer center website includes many tutorials for beginners and advanced users on using these classes.

3. YouTube – The YouTube API for Flash, allows developers to load the YouTube video player in Flash files. This player can load any public video and perform various functions like play, pause, seek, control volume etc. YouTube has the APIs for ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0, both of which are developed & supported by YouTube itself.
Note: YouTube recommends ActionScript 3.0 for any development and also advises to upgrade the existing ActionScript 2.0 applications to ActionScript 3.0.

4. Flickr – Filckr officially doesn’t support any API for Flash but there are quite a few options available, of which as3flickrlib is the most popular. Along with facility for authentication, uploading photos etc., it also has good documentation and tutorials for users.

5. Picasa – Picasa Flash API is an ActionScript 3.0 library for Picasa Web with no official Picasa support. This library can only be used for obtaining the images from Picasa web; it’s security restrictions don’t allow adding new images. Recently Google has added support for authentication from Flash, so writing the data would also be possible in the near future.

Learning Technologies 2010 – Recap

Amit Garg — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:40:30 +0000

Learning is fast turning Social, Informal, & Mobile.

That’s the message I’ve been hearing loud & clear from Learning Technologies 2010. While what’s being said in most of the sessions isn’t entirely new to us, it does reaffirm the direction in which things are going. The level of participation in these areas was clearly visible at the event which is a good sign. Adoption, after all, will happen only when L&D professionals start making some sense of it in first place.

Here are some highlights from the Day 1 sessions I attended:

1. Key Note by Lord Puttnam.
Lord David Puttnam is the producer of movies like Chariots of Fire & The Killing Fields, chairman of FutureLab and Chancellor of OpenUniversity. He had a simple but strong message. We need to prepare our children for the right skills and the current education system is not good enough for that. Watch the video below to get an idea of what he is saying. He also reiterated what I personally believe in strongly – that we learn from making mistakes and by trying again & again until we succeed. He summed up the keynote address with – “My biggest fear is in twenty years education itself would be discredited in the eyes of our children”. Worth a thought!

As L&D professionals we need to reflect on this: How are we preparing our workforce for the future?

2. From Content to Community: The changing face of L&D by Jane Hart.
Jane (@c4lpt) has really been on the forefront of everything related to Social Learning. She has written many articles on the subject and collated so much information on her site – it’s virtually the bible of Social Learning.

Her presentation focused on 5 different ways in which Social Media is being used for learning:

- Formal Structured
- Personal Directed
- Group Directed
- Intra Organizational
- Accidental & Serendipitous

She talked about need for new mindset (for e.g. recognition of self directed learning), new platforms (assuming that LMS systems don’t change – with which I disagree as UpsideLMS now has a social media pack available), and new skills (to manage learning in this changed environment)

The fact is Social Learning is coming at us like a revolution. L&D professionals would do well to accept this fact and start working to adopt the paradigm or risk being pushed into oblivion.

3. Using a web 2.0 social learning environment by Peter Butler.
Peter Butler is the Director of Learning at BT Group. Peter shared how BT has implemented social learning across the enterprise. He shared this video below about their Dare2Share portal that’s really the backbone of social learning at BT.

It was encouraging to see that what we discuss and propose to our clients is being successfully used at such a large scale. A few things that I really like about the Dare2Share platform are:

- There is a tag cloud presented in the right panel (similar to what you see on this blog) which helps users select their areas of interest.
- Users can report inappropriate content easily, though they have never had any such complaint so far. Goes on to show that the fears of people posting inappropriate content on social networks are really baseless.
- When you get to the right content piece, you could right click to see some further action options – including contacting the author of that content. Nice integration of systems there.

4. What Cloud Computing means for Learning by Stuart Lauchlan
Stuart is the editor of businesscloud9.com (part of siftmedia). He talked about the benefits of cloud computing (cheaper, easier, more scalable) and some of the prominent successes (salesforce.com, Google, etc). What stands out is distinct lack of standards in cloud computing as the bigger players don’t want to participate in creation of one.

5. The new smart devices for learning by Steve Wheeler
Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth) spoke of eLearning 3.0 as a combination of

- Distributed (cloud) Computing
- Extended Smart Mobile Technology
- Collaborative Intelligent Filtering
- 3D Visualization and Interaction

Here’s the presentation he shared at the conference:

6. Building Workforce capability with Experiential Learning by Charles Jennings
Charles is the Director of Duntroon Associates. He cited Deborah Compeau’s ( a professor at Richard Ivey Schools of Business) Jan 2010 research to bring up six types of learners. This research interestingly is focused on how people in organizations develop their technology skills. Not sure if it’s a good idea to assume similar behavior for developing all other types of skills as well, while it is tempting.

The six types are

- Purposive planners: structured & self-disciplined
- Explorers: find time to learn on their own
- Visionaries: find out about new technology and how it could impact them/organization
- Problem Solvers: Strong task oriented mindset. Not necessarily interested in technology
- Reluctant Learners: Focus on what they need to learn to survive
- Pinballs: Don’t think about learning. Do a lot of incidental learning

Assuming that we can use this categorization for all kind of skills, Charles argument was to use experiential learning for everyone except the Purposive Learners. From my experience these would be a small minority so practically for everyone you should use experiential learning. An acceptable conclusion given that almost all workplace learning is to ensure learners are able to perform better and what better than experiential learning in some form – be it simulation, scenarios, or games – to achieve that. Overall this was a very informative session and could be have been better if we hadn’t assumed all the participants to be ‘purposive planners’ and bring in some experiential learning into it.

That’s day 1 for you. Look out for a recap of day 2 next week.

Blending Learning with Social Technology Components

Abhijit Kadle — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:38:12 +0000

A lot of companies today face a resource situation that’s not unique in this age. A few key individuals holding important technical and project management knowledge is quite common.

Such key knowledge in the hands of few prevents it from being disseminated broadly and leads to an unhealthy dependence on those individuals.

Recently, I was asked to propose a solution that addressed just such a business concern. To change a purely instructor-led-program for leadership development that runs over eight months and involves these key individuals is a large and complex activity. The adjacent diagram represents just what converting such a program to a modern blend might look like. Each blend is unique and purposed to address a specific need. All the components we show may not be a part of the solution.

The company has valid concerns about letting important technical knowledge and skills reside amongst a few individuals; this is a specific business risk and needs address. Realizing this situation exists is the first step and a crucial one. The best way to mitigate this risk is take the tacit knowledge held by these few individuals, document it, and disseminate it in the best way possible across chosen groups of individuals. Web 2.0 unleashed a wave of tools that facilitate learning by leveraging social networks and informal channels. Such tools must form an essential part of any company’s learning strategy going forward; as these will fast emerge as the primary channels for learning.

We recommended that the company seek to provide such a Web 2.0 enabled platform for employees to build their own networks and channels. Using a singular enterprise-wide system for training groups in time means that each subsequent group can build on the contributions of the ones that preceded it. Each iteration adds valuable knowledge that can be leveraged by the organization for better productivity and performance.

We also illustrated how a program that blends various types of learning interventions and tools, that range from formal to informal and involve collaboration looks like. We’re sharing this with our readers, perhaps you’d find this useful or inspiring.

Disclaimer: This is just representative and doesn’t mean a blended learning program including these elements would necessarily include all those components, their durations and intensities.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009: The Final List

Amit Garg — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:37:42 +0000

Jane Hart released the final list of top 100 tools for learning 2009 last month. It’s been created based on responses from 278 learning professionals worldwide and has taken several months to compile.

The Top 10 Tools are:

1.    Twitter
2.    Delicious
3.    YouTube
4.    Google Reader
5.    Google Docs
6.    Wordpress
7.    Slideshare
8.    Google Search
9.    Audacity
10. Firefox

Its important to note that the list seems to be dominated by people’s preference of tools they use for personal learning. These are not the top tools used for creating Learning Solutions. We contributed to this list and here’s the list of Our Top 10 Tools for Learning 2009. The post also has a list of my top 5 tools for personal learning.

Here is a presentation put up by Jane on SlideShare :

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

View more documents from Jane Hart.

Michael Hanley has written an interesting post on this list of top tools. He questions the real learning potential of Twitter and wonders if it’s a fad. He also wonders if L&D departments are poorly funded as most tools mentioned on the top 100 list are free.

Incidentally, I came across this tweet earlier this week @tonyramos – “For me tweeting is a note-taking activity: it diminishes my attention but helps my retention”. I can identify with this as I seem to be finding links to some great information & news through people I follow. Well filtered and value added. I either review them immediately or mark them as favorites for future reading and that seems to be working well for my PLE. I think micro blogging will remain – in some form (Twitter or something else) – an important personal learning tool for some years.