Learning Tools 2022

What tools are people using to support learning?

Every year for the last 16 years, Jane Hart has compiled an annual list of “Top Tools for Learning”.

Results for 2022 are here, with supporting analysis.

Key takeaways:

• fewer votes and for far fewer tools compared to 2021
• the top 5 tools (Youtube, PowerPoint, Google Search, Microsoft Teams, Zoom) were very significantly more popoular than the remainder of the list, which Jane interprets as showing that learning is now considered by most organisations as something that happens in the course of work
• in the light of fewer tools being nominated, Jane has dropped the separate lists for personal learning, workplace learning and educaiton, however she has published a useful Venn diagram in PDF form showing the context of use for the top 100 tools.

My own nominations

I overlooked the call for votes this year, but this is what I would have posted, together with changes since I last recorded my choices in 2019.

My key learning tools in 2022

Markdown

It may seem strange to put a format in a list of tools, but the biggest change I have made is to build all of my learning and note-making processes (personal and professional) around plain text files, usually formatted with Markdown. This is the core of the sense-making part of my PKM processes.

Using plain text opens the door to a huge range of tools, and where I need to convert to other formats (e.g. Microsoft Word) for working with less-techy colleagues it is easy enough to generate other output formats.

Feedly

Feedly remains my key tool for keeping up to date across a range of personal and professional interests. For many of us RSS never went away, and there are encouraging signs that it may have a resurgence.

Twitter

Although this still remains an important source of information, fighting the algorithms gets harder and harder, and once I have found someone interesting I always look to see if they have a website with an RSS feed.

Diigo

Pretty much any page I find interesting or have to look at for work gets bookmarked into Diigo. The highlighting and annotation tools are usually the first step in sense-making.

Drafts

Incredibly versatile tool for creating and re-purposing text on iOS devices. Custom actions written in JavaScript allow me to push, pull and manipulate text pretty much as I need.

Foam

an increasingly good notes tool that sits within Visual Studio Code

Zotero

an essential tool for capturing and annotating references to formal papers

SnipD

Starting to build this AI-augmented podcast learning tool into my flow.

YouTube

I still use YouTube as a learning source, although I find most videos rather too longwinded compared to reading a textual summary.

Github

For the parts of my personal and professional learning that relate to code, Github is key. Whether it’s reading other people’s code, sharing my own ideas or collaborating on open source this tool is essential.

Working Copy

an essential companion for working on my phone with text that lives in Github

Microsoft Teams

This is a continually-growing part of my working day, and I keep finding new ways to push collaborative learning in the flow of work

DuckDuckGo

I have switched web search on my phone to DuckDuckGo, and it’s about time I did so on my computer too, to get away from the pervasive tracking of Google search.

Hugo

This blog remains published on Hugo, and I have no plans to migrate it

Other web site code

My digital garden is published from a subset of my notes using custom website code, currently heavily based on this Gatsby theme.

Bubbling under

I’m starting to pay more attention to hypothes.is.

Another growth area is Indieweb - I already have web mentions working in and out of this blog, and I’m interested in potentially moving feed-related activities to an indieweb basis.

Tempted to give Dendron a go too.

iaWriter is becoming a popular tool on my phone for developing blog posts etc away from the computer

Down and/or out

Federated Wiki

As I have written elsewhere, I have put down my experimentation with FedWiki, replacing the personal note-taking function with a combination of plain-text tools working on Markdown files.