Seven Online Tools for Web-Based Learning - What are yours?

We're sure you have noticed: The way we learn from the web is changing every day.

Flickr Photo Credit.

At Kevin's Blog, Chief Learning Officer Kevin Eikenberry writes an article he says "is meant to help you use the Web in new ways; to help you learn more, and learn it faster; therefore moving you towards your goals more rapidly than ever" and offering some resources for each of these, he suggests that learners get on board with

1. Blogs
2. Social Networks
3. Wikis
4. The Audio/Visual Web, and
5. Google Alerts

Our choices can be overwhelming, and I like the way that Kevin has outlined 5 basic categories of tools ---if we were to rename the 5th one as "RSS aggregators and notifiers," Google Alerts being just one of the options. Kevin's distinction of an "audio/visual web" is not one I would have thought of, and he is so right!

In that vein, I would add two more:

6. Bookmarklets
Those browser tools which allow you to quickly bookmark your web-based finds for later tagging or referencing. The web is a virtual library, and you are the librarian! The one I use most is del.icio.us.

7. Lifestreaming
As my newest learning, this is something I am currently experimenting with at Tumblr. A sneak peek for you: Ho‘ohana Aloha. JJL Contributor Joanna Young was the one who got me intrigued with this, when she explained that to ‘lifestream’ is to "put all the streams from your writing, your photos, [your finds] and your networks together in one place." Joanna's Tumblr Log is called  The Short and Sweet of Confident Writing.

If you were to sit with a wide-eyed web newbie, placing a mouse in their hand as they sit in front of your computer, would you have a number 8 or 9 for this list in your orientation for them?

~ Rosa Say for Joyful Jubilant Learning
Mahalo Dean for the coffee!

Postscript: Before you answer, you might want to take a look at a short video on how our kids now learn, recently shared by JJLer April Groves at her blog My Beautiful Chaos.

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5 From the JJL Archives:

• More on Google Alerts: Thank you for teaching me (Google treasure maps).
• Facebook: Friend or Foe?
• Learning Best Practices on the Internet.
• This Web 2.0 Thing Explained (A video clip).

• BONUS! JJL Contributor Benjamin Bach had interviewed Kevin Eikenberry in our series, Jubilant Learners Speak Up! ~ A Remarkable Interview with Kevin Eikenberry. A snippet:

BB: How can I become remarkable?

KE: I believe there are five things that anyone must do to accelerate their personal progress towards remarkable:

Believe – you must believe that you have the capacity to be remarkable (you do!)

Recognize and remind – you must recognize the unique strengths that you bring to the world and continually remind yourself.  When you believe and recognize you have  a chance to do the next step …

Actualize through action.  You must take action; action to learn, to try and to use.  Without the input of energy into action, no growth, progress or results can occur.

Gratitude – being Remarkable isn’t about ego – quite the opposite. Highly self-actualized people – further down their path towards Remarkable – realize their abilities and are grateful for them. When you truly believe and recognize your potential how could you be anything but grateful?

Serve – remarkable people use their gifts, talents and wisdom to serve others.

Comments

[Benjamin Bach]

PS - I highly recommend Kevin's new book Remarkable Leadership.

[Joanna Young]

Hi Rosa

I have to confess I haven't been using my tumblr account for some time now other than the automatic pinging from my home account. Maybe I should go back to it, not least as I am now writing in quite a lot of places and it would be good to bundle them together...

I think part of the problem is that there are so many other places out there where I can save links and quotes - I'm using the clippings function on bloglines for posts I want to go back to, co.mmments to keep a note of places where I want to follow a conversation (it's fantastic) and stumbleupon to share posts I really enjoy. I like stumbling because it works as a bookmarker for me but also serves as a vote or recommendation which might get picked up by the stumbling community. I get a lot of visitors from stumbleupon so like putting something back into it.

The other place I've been micro-blogging recently (the other possible use I saw for tumblr) is Twitter, and that is one that I'm still not sure about but it's definitely growing on me. It's a way to narrate some things you're thinking about or reflecting upon, catch up with others that you know, listen out, pitch in...

I'm also sure there are learning possibilities in Twitter - something I'm hoping to explore sometime in the new year - with the help of the other JJLers who are users I hope...

Joanna

[Rosa Say]

I can appreciate what you mean Joanna: We make the smartest choices on what we keep in our toolbox based on how often we reach for them within our trusted work systems. Sometimes we dabble excessively and get scattered, but more often than not there is a kind of natural selection happening, and tools which fall out of favor are simply not filling our needs anymore. To use our current metaphor here, I truly love meeting up with you on Jubilation Way Joanna, but we do choose different scenic routes at times!

Up to now I have resisted more interactive apps like StumbleUpon and Twitter in a high need for my ma'alahi focus with streamlining my essentials - I'm not completely saying no to them, more a *no for now.* They'd lend too much static noise to my current playlist.

This may sound a bit anti-social, but I am loving Tumblr because it is just an all-me kind of aggregation: Not planning to go overboard on the lifestreaming (if I were micro-blogging I wouldn't include it), but I am planning to offer the Tumblr feed to those of my subscribers who have most of my different subscriptions. For instance, I suspect those who choose to engage with me via email (if at all), lurking on my sites and preferring to keep invisible online will like the one-stop shop. In only using what is there and not trying to hack it (as I tend to do with TypePad) I've been adding commentary on why I wrote what I did, with a more personal journaling component getting woven in to connect what might seem like disparate writing when my blogging is read separately and in a different order than I had written it. I have shared my Tumblr with one of the execs I now coach, and she loves the more chronological approach I take there versus the hit-and-miss way she used to RSS-read my stuff.

I am also finding I really like Tumblr for its lack of too many bells and whistles which distract. For instance, I don't need more stats to check and obsess over! More ma'alahi contentment :)