TOP 10 TOOLS 2007, 2008 & 2009
Stephen Downes

Stephen works for the National Research Council, Institute for Information Technology, in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. He specializes in online learning, content syndication, and new media.

Stephen is perhaps best known for his daily research newsletter, OLDaily (short for Online Learning Daily), which reaches thousands of readers across Canada and around the world.

Stephen's Top 10 Tools as at 28 September 2009

1. Firefox - this is my workhorse, the tool that is always open on my desktop, the application I use to access pretty much everything else. It's hard for me to imagine anyone listing anything other than theire web browser as their top tool, especially when so many other tools - Facebook, Twitter, etc.,require a browser.

2. Thunderbird - this is my email client, and I still open email first thing every day. Though email is dropping in usefulness, it is still my primary form of personal contact with other people. I suppose I could do without email, but lacking a tool as versitile and convenient, I don`t want to.

3. Google Reader - I use Google reader to access my RSS feeds, and with my subscription list sitting at 816 feeds, it`s obviously an important part of my day. I don`t read RSS feeds as deeply as I read email or other personal communications, but it works really well as a means to scan my environment and to suggest items for follow-up.

4. gRSShopper - this is the tool I use to create my newsletter and my website. I built it myself so it serves my needs perfectly. Other people may find installing the Perl scripts and supporting modules to be burdensome.

5. Blogger - I still use blogger as a place to publish longer posts. I don`t know why; it seems som institutional. But I really like the editor and it`s nice to take advantage of Blogger`s high search position.

6. Twitter - I use twitter to keep people informed when I am having service outages, when I am traveling, or when I have posted something new. I do not subscribe to people using Twitter - the volume of messages would be indistinguishable from noise - but I monitor Twitter using targeted searches and hashtags.

7. MS Word - yes, I know, I should use Open Office or something, but Microsoft`s 2007 edition of MS Word is a brilliant piece of software. I am totally sold on teh citation management features, and other functions are - once you`ve learned them - a lot easier to use. I write internal NRC documents using Word and have released some papers using it, with more to come.

8. Paint Shop Pro - still my workhorse graphics editing tool. I would also use it for photos, but it wipes out exif data, so I use Photoshop Elements instead. But if I need to make a quick professional-looking diagram, this is my tool of choice. p.s. I hate - hate! - the Gimp.

9. PowerPoint - my main tool for creating presentations, and I create many presentations (25 or so) in a year. Though I could use other tools, and would be tempted to do so, I find I prefer to stay with PowerPoint because it allows me to upload to Slideshare.net and hence make all my presentations easily viewable online (and on my website).

10. Audacity - pretty much any work with Audio I perform with Audacity, my one-stop audio recorder and editor. It lets me import audio from any device or applioation, mix tracks, add effects, and output in MP3. If I want, the tracks can be imported into videos being edited or created in premiere or Camtasia.

Stephen's Top 10 Tools as at 2 March 2008 and 20 July 2007

1. Firefox - My web browser is so ubiquitous it scarcely even deserves to be called a tool. It is more like the place where I do my work, like my living room or my computer monitor. But it is also the thing I interact most directly with, the thing I design for, the think that is my window to the world. So it's first on my list.

2. Thunderbird - Email may be dead, but my email client continues to be a place of constant activity. Most of our corporate communications come by email, as do the various mailings lists I subscribe to, comments and enquiries from people around the world, and more. Email remains my primary communications tool precisely because it is asynchronous - I prefer to send and receive messages on my own schedule.

3. LAMP - LAMP stands for "Linux - Apache - MySQL - Perl" and can be summarized as 'my web server'. My web server is a big part of my work -  it is where (using Firefox) I create my newsletter, store my articles, link to photos and slide shows, and more. My work on my web server - and specifically the software I write to run my web server - is a concrete representation of the concepts I talk about in my publications and presentations.

4. PowerPoint - Not only do we have the 'death by PowerPoint' phenomenon, we also have the 'software produced by the Borg' phenomenon. At the same time, I cannot deny having produced more than a hundred PowerPoint presentations and having found nothing that lets me present an outline of my thinking as easily as PowerPoint. This is the tool I use to prepare my talks, and that makes it central in my work.

5. Paint Shop Pro - I have created hundreds of diagrams with this software, edited my photographs, created web design elements, and more. Paint Shop Pro is what makes me keep a Windows laptop kicking around in the corner. There is nothing on the Mac or on Linux that works as well - Photoshop edits photos really well but is a lousy drawing tool, while the Gimp has what can only be described as a user-hostile interface.

6. Google Reader - I have long used an RSS reader of one sort or another and my current reader of choice is the Google Reader. As always, this selection will last until (a) some better reader comes along, or (b) I finally get Edu_RSS (my website software) working just the way I want it. Until them, I use Google Reader to keep tract of 400 or so RSS feeds ranging from school bloggers to ed tech to new media.

7. NoteTab - Again, this is a Windows program that really has no peer on the Mac and on Linux. NoteTab is a simple text editor that outputs in plain text, which makes it very useful for creating computer code. What makes it work really well is the tabbed interface, which means I can edit a number of files at once, its very simple interface, and its speed - there is never any delay.

8. gFTP - FTP stands for 'File Transfer Protocol' and is what I use to transfer files from my computer to my website. gFTP is an open source FTP program that runs on Linux. On Windows I use WS-FTP, which used to be a great program, but it is one of these things that was 'improved' too much, and is now unstable and unreliable. gFTP is fast, clean, and does what it needs to do - it transfers files. There is no good FTP program for the Mac.

9. Google Search - Although everyone's search engine has become more and more cluttered with commercial search results recently, rendering some searches - such as for hotel websites - unusable, Google search nonetheless plays an important role in my work, allowing me to fill the gaps in my regular information streams with access to archived materials - the collected papers, websites, blog posts, and images posted on the web.

10. Audacity - Though I use iTunes to manage my music, this is only because it works well with my iPod. And I use an iPod only because my iRiver was smashed and can't be replaced. My real audio application - the tool I use to create, edit and convert audio files - is Audacity. What I like is the ability to work in multiple file formats, to record long chunks of content, easy editing and content filtering (including noise removal) and to output in small MP3 files.