Jane Hart's top 100 tools for learning

Jane has finalised this year's top 100 tools for learning, as identified by, well... you.

The composition of this list makes it clear that there is no real boundary around tools-for-learning as opposed to tools-for-anything-else. Just about anything can be used for learning, really.

Learning opps to share as a family

Yesterday, for the first time in ages, I had a long car journey to make, with which, in my geeky little world, comes the opportunity to listen to several hours of BBC Radio 4. In the space of yesterday's journey, I discovered three learning opportunities to share with my family.

The first of these is 1001 Inventions. A travelling exhibition (currently at the Science Museum in London) of discoveries made by men and women in Muslim civilisation during the period in which Europe was experiencing it's 'dark ages'. It seems it wasn't dark all over the world. The exhibition opened yesterday and runs until 25 April. Like the rest of the Science Museum and most British museums, it's free. We plan to visit soon.

Just listening to an interview with one of the people involved in the exhibition, I learned something. Did you know that algebra originates in the Arabic world and that the word comes from 'al-jabr' which means balance, reunion and reconciliation?

The second is a Radio 4 series called The History of the World in 100 Objects, but I want to talk about that in greater depth, so will do a separate post on that.

The third is a three-part BBC 4 (a television channel, not to be confused with the aforementioned radio station) series that started last night called Chemistry: A Volatile History. This series charts the discovery of the elements in our modern periodic table. We watched the first episode as a family and were riveted. The producers have included loads of practical demonstrations that make the programme appealing to viewers with shorter attention spans (or lower tolerance for anything that it isn't a sitcom), and they've managed to pitch it at a level that will work for a wide range of people.

With the benefit of hindsight, the existence of some elements seems patently obvious, and my younger son was amused that serious minded researchers once believed in the existence of phlostigon. Since he is planning to study chemistry when he starts his A levels in September, the programme was perfectly timed for him.

You could have knocked me over with a feather!

So there I was in this pre-conference workshop at Online Educa. I wasn't the oldest person in the room, but I was certainly helping to raise the average age.

We were talking about how to meet the learning needs of an increasingly digitally literate workforce. One woman expressed the view that our generation wasn't going to be able to achieve this. That we would have to leave it to the next generation. She also seemed to feel that it would have to wait until things had slowed down a bit, so that L&D could catch up.

She wasn't talking to me. She was talking to the panel and I was not a member, but I felt compelled to answer. No doubt this was both poor conference etiquette and poor manners, but I couldn't hold my tongue.

I asked how she thought the next generation would have it any easier, since they will in their turn be followed by younger people who are more comfortable using technologies that have yet to be invented. She was confident that their current literacy would enable them to make the shift. I'm not so sure. Every generation - in fact, I don't even want to use the word 'generation' since it implies a bigger timeframe than is the reality in my experience - will see the tools with which they are familiar rendered obsolete by new inventions. We don't know what hasn't been invented yet and it may be as different from web 2.0 (and 3.0 and 4.0) as 2.0 is from 1.0. We don't know that it will be any easier for our kids to learn the future technologies than it has been for us to learn these ones.

I am also pretty certain that the rate of progress and change is not going to slow down. In fact, I suspect quite the opposite will be the case.

I find it odd that, surrounded by people whose mothers may well be my age, I am often the most 'radical' person - or at least one of the most radical people - in the room.

How can this be the case? Perhaps I am the one who is deluded.

Time will tell.

iPhone apps (free)

I promise not to go on and on about my iPhone, but I thought that my journey of discovery might be of help to others out there new to the world of the device. I won't review the device itself, far more professional people have already done that one to death.

What I did was put a message out on Twitter and Facebook asking my peeps for some suggestions with regard to must-have apps. For now, I am restricting myself to freebies, even though a few very useful sounding apps with price tags have been suggested, too.

Facebook - pretty much Facebook on the go. Very handy.

LinkedIn - as before, this is LinkedIn on the go.

Remember the milk - this is an app which allows you to take your to-do list with you wherever you go. You can organise your list according to a range of criteria, and you have the capacity to prioritise your tasks, too. I no longer use Outlook, but, when I did, I tended to be one of the few people who made full use of the Tasks feature. This is something like that... but right in your handbag/pocket.

Freshbooks - this is a great one for us independent consultant types. It allows you to track time and then bill your clients. You can annotate the entries, and they will queue up when you're off-line.

Evernote - this was the winner of the TechCrunch best mobile startup award. It more or less lets you make notes about anything and everything that happens in your life, using text, photos and audio. It autosynchronises your notes with your computer and the web, and it is able to search text snapshots.

Sugarsync - gives you access to all your PCs and Macs, even when they are switched off. Which of us hasn't experienced the dismay of finding ourselves without a crucial file? It sounds phenomenal.

reQall - a voice enabled memory aid to integrate your iPhone, email, text messaging and IM into an organiser/reminder system.

Wikipanion - allowing you access to wikipedia via your phone. So cool.

Animoto - as with a few of the others, this is a phone version of the web app. I've used and enjoyed Animoto before, so I can see this one coming in handy!

Skype - free calls via Skype from your mobile in any free wifi zone.

Of course, because I'm a sucker for them, I have also downloaded a few free games:

Hangman - I downloaded this one pretty much straight away. I have won every game, as you would expect ;o), but it gave me great practice at figuring out how to select the right letter from the on-screen keyboard!

Touch lite - the full version of this has a price tag. The lite version is one of those games where you eliminate set of adjacent blocks in the same colour in an attempt to clear the board. The larger the set, the more points it will earn you.

reMovem free - similar to the Touch blocks game, but with bubbles

Scramble - like its Facebook counterpart, this timed game involves forming words from adjacent letters in a random assemblage. In spite of my skill at and love for word games, I really suck at this one!

Sudoku - what it says on the tin

wordee lite - Ugh! I am awful at this game! You get a collection of letters in a grid, and you have to move them around to form a mini crossword. When a letter is in the right place, it glows. The problem is, you cant just move a letter at a time. You have to move a whole row or column. Epic fail. Once again, the full version has a price tag.

Creating animations

Thanks to Irmeli Aro for the pointer (via Facebook) to this neat little tool, called Dvolver, which can be used to create animated vignettes.

Of course, it is limited, but I reckon a creative person could work within its limits to create some pretty neat movie-lets to use in a variety of situations.

I had great fun playing with it this morning, but I'm a bit embarrassed by my lame attempts at humour to share them here.

LPoD - dichroic glass

Today's learning point relates to the bracelet I received for mothers' day. It is made of beads of dichroic glass, which appear to change colour, depending on the angle at which you view them.

Dichroic coating was originally developed by NASA for the aerospace industry. The material is used in the visors of space helmets. I have also heard some reports that it is used in the Hubble telescope, but I have been unable to verify this. The glass contains microlayers of different metal oxides, applied using an electron bombarder inside a vacuum chamber. These reflect and refract light in different ways, resulting in the effect of different colours when it is tilted this way and that. In fact, no color is actually produced. The perceived colours are the result of light manipulation.

It is now very popular in costume jewellery design and manufacture, as much because of the price tag as the depth and range of colours. Because the reflection/refraction cannot be accurately predicted, no two pieces of dichroic glass are ever exactly alike.

Here's an example, picked at random from the many returns from a google search.