March 2010 Review

As March draws to a close here is a roundup of the articles and tools added to the main Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT) site in March.

Articles/postings added to the Reading lists

Looking at the list of 25 articles that I added in March, it wasn't difficult to spot the overwhelming theme this month; they are mainly about Facebook.  Feeding the titles into Wordle, of course showed this even better in the text cloud it produced (click on image for larger version).

The reason for this may have been mainly due to the fact that I was working on (a) a Facebook project for a client, and (b) revising my own How to use Facebook in Social Learning guide, but I also tend to agree with Steve Rubel who in an article, Facebook will rule the web during the next decade, (login required), in Advertising Age, states:

"If the 2000s was the Google decade, then the 2010s will be the Facebook decade."

However, my favourite 3 articles this month aren't actually Facebook-related, they are more general:

• Envisioning the post-LMS era: The Open Learning Network, Jonathan Mott, Educause Quarterly, Vol 3, No 1, 2010
• Why social media policies don't work, Mathew Ingram, GigaOm, 12 March 2010
• Learning 2.0: The impact of social media on learning in Europe, (PDF) JRC European Commission, 2010

Tools added to the Directory of Learning Tools

Now that the Directory contains over 2,000 tools in 12 different categories, I am becoming stricter about new ones that I am adding.  In fact in March I only added 16 tools.  A number of these I have already posted about, but my 3 favourite tools this month are:

• TypePadWith.Me - Open source Etherpad frozen in time - Free, Hosted
• Skysa Toolbar - Widget to add toolbar to a web page and include RSS, twitter, facebook and other links - Free, Add code
• Pakrati.us - A bookmarking service for Twitter that uses Delicious - Free, Hosted

Of course, I am always interested in new tools, so do let me know of any you think should be added to the Directory.

Some changes at the site

Finally, if you do visit the C4LPT site, then you may notice some changes I am making, in order to structure and aggregate  the resources in a more efficient way.   I'll post more about this once it is complete.  

Comments

[Jorge L. Alonso]

Hi Helen,

Link to the Skysa Toolbar website is wrong. It goes to the Sitemeter web site.

Thanks for your useful information

Jorge L. Alonso G.
Argentina

[Jane Hart]

Jorge, don't knwo who Helen is! Link to Skysa toolbar repaired.