Analysis of Top 100 Tools for Learning Spring 2008

Note this analysis is of the Spring 2008 list as at 31 March 2008; a
new analysis will become available in November 2008 when we finalise the list for 2008

Raw data

• 155 people contributed (of which 92 were new contributors this year)

• 81 contributors came from education (schools, colleges universities) and 74 from workplace learning (including professional development) eg L&D managers, trainers, learning designers, developers, consultants, etc)

• Contributors came from 22 different countries including 59 from US, 31 from UK, 13 from Canada, 9 from Australia, etc.

• 461 tools were mentioned in total.

Tools selection

I provided some guidelines this year on the choice of tools and these three  have undoubtedly had an effect on the list his year

1. All Google products were to be mentioned separately

2. All MS Office products were to be mentioned separately

3. Only 1 tool could be selected for each choice, where more than 1 choice was made the “vote” was split over the tools named

The Tools

Firstly, we’ll take a look at the position of the tools themselves, and in particular those tools that have significantly moved up, down or even out of the list this year.

Top 10  - with more than 30 votes

Delicious is this year’s No 1 knocking Firefox off that position (going down to 2)

Google Reader has risen to 3rd from 7th last year

Audacity moves into the Top 10 in joint 9th place (up from 11th last year), whilst Word goes out of the Top 10 down to joint 22nd place.

Retaining a place in the Top 10 are Skype, Google Search, Wordpress, PowerPoint, gMail and Blogger

Top 11-20 - with between 20 and 29 votes

This. like last year, is a very interesting part of the list:

New entrants in the Top 20 are:

• Wikipedia in at 12th up from 26th

• Slideshare in at 14th up from joint 31st

• Ning in at =17th up from 31st

• Twitter in at =17th with a significant jump from 43rd

• YouTube in at =17th up from 22nd

Retaining a place in the top 20 are Google Docs, Moodle, iGoogle, flickr and wikispaces

But dropping out of top 20 are Bloglines, Captivate, Facebook, Outlook and MindManager

Top 21-109  - with between 3 and 19 votes

Tools on the list from last year that have made a significant move up the list include:

• Voicethread from joint 101st up to 24th (there’s been significant interest in this tool)

• Zoho up from 57th to joint 36th (and now just ahead of OpenOffice)

• Pageflakes up from joint 101st to 31st (beating its rival Netvibes at =43rd although not catching up with iGoogle yet)

• Camtasia up from 50 to 35th (was this due to a free giveaway earlier this year?)

• Diigo up from 72nd to =52nd (another social bookmarking tool)

• eXe from 72 to =52nd (this course authoring tool seems to be catching on at last)

• Second Life (which has done a lot better than last year) up to 41st from joint 101st

Brand new entrants to the list include:

• Jing (screen capture/screencasting tool) is the highest new entrant at 30th

• Wetpaint (wiki tool) enters at 43rd position

• Nvu (web authoring tool) at joint 48th

• Garageband, Paint.Net and Stumbleupon enter at joint 52nd

• And another 20 tools lower in the Top 100

Finally, there were a large number of tools that

1. dropped down the list this year, including. MindManager, Dreamweaver, Netvibes, Thunderbird, MediaWiki and GIMP; and those that

2. had a place on the list last year but didn’t make it onto this year’s list. The most significant of these is: Elgg which was at joint 40th position last year.

State of e-Learning in Spring 2008

So what does this list say about the state of e-learning in early 2008?

Let’s consider this in two parts: (1) personal learning; and (2) creating learning solutions

(1) Using tools to manage one’s personal learning, productivity and performance is still as important as last year. But the fact that many of these are also sharing or collaborative tools means that they are more than just personal tools, e.g. with delicious it's not just about storing bookmarks for your own use but also for sharing them with colleagues, students, etc; Google Docs is not just about creating personal documentation and presentations but about co-creation of content; Wordpress, Blogger and other blogging tools are not just for reflecting on your own learning but sharing it with others and encouraging them to contribute to your thinking.

(2) A wide range of authoring tools do appear on the list, however, as I began to gather the Top 10 Tools list this year I became increasingly aware of the differences in the tools being used to produce learning solutions for the workplace as opposed for education.. So I ran an analysis of the Top 10 tools used for creating and delivering learning solutions by workplace learning professionals and then by educators (in schools, colleges, universities). Here are the results

What does this show? It certainly seems to confirm my feeling that formal, traditional (Learning 1.0) approaches (i.e. content-based courses, tutorials, etc) are still dominant in the workplace, whilst educators are embracing a much wider range of Web 2.0 tools to create more social, collaborative and informal approaches to learning.

Additionally, to note is that 7 out of the 10 tools for creating learning solutions in the workplace are commercial whilst only 1 of the 10 in education is. A tool being free does seem to be a more significant factor for educators, and teachers and lecturers are using the free tools alongside or even instead of other institutional tools; whereas workplace learning professionals still seem to be focusing heavily on commercial tools for the development of formal learning solutions - although they do seem to be using free tools for their own personal use.

Post-script:  There has been some discussion about the reasons why workplace learning is still Web 1,0 and Michele Martin has written two insightful postings: Looks like Workplace Learning is still Web 1.0 and More Thoughts on Why Workplace Learning Is Largely Learning 1.0.

This was therefore one of the reasons that I produced my article 25 Tools every learning professional should have in their Toolbox – and all for free – as well as the accompanying professional development resource – in order to promote the use of FREE Web 2.0 tools more widely.