Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools

Jane Hart’s compilation of top tools has reached 100, and very impressive it is, too.

I am pleased to see that ‘books and paper‘ - on my own list - made it on to the list, but not to the top 10, which is:

1. Firefox (58 mentions)
2. del.icio.us (43)
3. Skype (37)
4. Google Search (36)
5. WordPress (30)
6. Gmail (29)
7. PowerPoint (29)
8. Google Reader (29)
9. Blogger (25)
10. Word (21)

Well, that’s the top 10 as it stands today. However, this is a dynamic list. Jane invites your contribution and will update the list when it arrives.

Of course any editor will tell you that during the slack summer months, a list is a great way to fill up space (10 books to take to the beach, 7 things to do with the kids when it’s raining). Jane’s analysis of the list, however shows that this list goes well beyond filling the pages during a light-news period.

In fact, this list is a useful service that takes a snap shot of how we’re learning with technology right now. It also introduces things we may never have heard of before, or those we have heard of, but have been unsure of until now. In this way it’s a useful form of personal recommendation.

For me the key tools are not those in the top ten, but those bubbling under, in positions 11 to 20. If you are not familiar with these, you might want to have a look at them. Here’s my pick of the best of the rest, all of which I have either used or experimented with:

Audacity

Bloglines

Moodle

Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Wikispaces

iGoogle

MindManager

Interestingly, Second Life languishes towards the bottom of the list with a measly 2 recommendations. 

Hopefully Jane will find a way to make this chronologically comparable. I would love to compare the list in 2009 with what we have now. That would tell us a lot about the ways we learn and work, and how they change over time.