Jane Hart recently asked me to contribute my top ten learning tools to her ever growing list of great resources at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies. If you aren’t familiar with this site, I highly recommend it. (I particularly like 25 Must-have Free Tools.) If you are familiar with it, take this as a reminder to visit it more often.

You can find my list in the Top Tools for Learning section of the site, but I thought I’d also recount it here with a bit more commentary and a few extras. Here goes:

1. Del.icio.us – Del.icio.us has become one of my primary tools for personal knowledge management. Pretty much anything I find interesting and worth returning to is bookmarked there. I’ve been consistently adding to the list I keep here on Mission to Learn in the resources area and have added a number of new tags as well.
2. Google Reader – Another key tool for personal knowledge management and daily learning. I hope to start taking more advantage of some of the sharing functionality soon.
3. Audacity – I’m starting to do much more with audio, and Audacity really is a pretty incredible piece of free recording and editing software. I’ll be speaking at a technology showcase for the Association Executives of North Carolina in a couple of weeks, and Jim Thompson, their Executive Director, and I did a podcast preview for the event using Audacity.
4. iTunes – iTunes, in combination with my iPod, is the source for a lot of the content I listen to and view when traveling. I’m particularly fond of Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast and Sound Opinions from Chicago Public Radio.
5. Slideshare – Perhaps dangerous as a way of proliferating bad presentations, but also a great resources for finding and sharing great content. My Learning 2.0 presentation is posted here. Happy to say it has been viewed nearly 1400 times as of this post.
6. WordPress – My blogging platform of choice and the backbone of Mission to Learn. I prefer to have my own installation rather than using WordPress.com. I’ve been accumulating some WordPress related links on my Del.icio.us account.
7. Ning – I have yet to built a Ning community, but I have participated in a few, and really like this as a tool for setting up a focused social network.
8. PBWiki – A couple of projects I have worked on lately have used PBWiki as a collaboration tool. It’s hard to beat for ease of use. Dave Sabol also recently turned me on to Wik.is and we’ll be using that to collaborate on an upcoming speaking engagement.
9. Articulate Presenter – For the clients I work with, a tool like Articulate is like a gift from heaven. Combined with Quizmaker and Engage, you can transform PowerPoint into a pretty incredible production tool. I mentioned Articulate way back when Tom Kuhlman launched the Rapid E-learning blog. (Funny, when I went back to look at that post I realized I had mentioned Jane Hart and her Top 10 list there.)
10. StumbleUpon – I am a fan of formal and informal learning. I’m also a fan of flat out random learning that can help prompt new ideas and catalyze creativity. StumbleUpon is a great tool for this purpose. I’ve been using it a lot more lately and have come across several items that I have added to my More than 100 Free Places to Learn post.

What else? I mentioned I would throw in some extras. Well, one would be Scribd. In a comment on an earlier posting someone suggested that I post the Learning 2.0 eBook there. I did. Scribd transmogrified it into a Flash file that can be read online. And, of course, you become part of a community when you join Scribd, so you can comment on other postings, mark things as favorites, etc.

In spite of my lousy follow up on my list of 22 Things to Help the Environment from back on last year’s Blog Action Day, I’m still a fan of 43 Things as a learning tool. And perhaps writing about it again in one of my main learning tools - this blog - will inspire me to get back to my list. (Come join me!)

So, what are your favorite learning tools?

JTC

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