It’s that time of the year again to submit for Jane Hart’s Top Tools for Learning. I’ve been doing this every year since 2012 she created this annual program which has now become a record of how the tools for my personal learning have changed over the years.

This year has been a complete flip for me since deciding to remove myself from social media.

As an active Twitter user for many years, I permanently deleted my account which means that this year, for the first time ever in Jane’s top tools, I don’t have Twitter on my list. (It was amusing to note that Twitter had gone down last on my list back in 2021 and completely dropped off its perch this year).

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This has meant my learning practices have changed and in some way, in that they’ve become a little bit harder. It means that the ‘sharing’ bit of my learning practice is limited to only this blog or through personally connecting with people through email and direct messages to let them know I’m still alive – and blogging.

However, my peace of mind, feedback coming from people who I know, like and trust, deeper connections and more meaningful conversations with people have meant that my focus, attention and most of all, my creativity has returned in spades. For the first time in a long time, I’m getting back to clarity of thought and in the process, have re-established more deeper relationships with my networks.

Whether or not my blog posts are being read, shared, followed or talked about “out there”, I have no idea. I’ve stopped myself from going down that negative feedback loop.

However, this situation has made me reassess everything of what I use, the importance of a reflective space (such as blogging) and that there’s a whole world of people out there who are doing what I’m doing and connecting in different spaces like the Indieweb.

Yes, it’s a little bit harder than just ‘clicking’ Share and getting your stuff out there but not impossible.

The world is now opening up to me to question it a bit more, make new ways of finding the people and conversations out there without the algorithms.

So let’s look at my new Learning Tools for 2022.

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1. Feedly

Feedly RSS Pro is a must for me. It has now become the only way to consume content and keep up to date with what’s happening.

I have been using it for many years and I have moved all my newsletters to it plus added more collections around areas of interest (eg French language; News; Microsoft; Knitting and IndieWeb). Given that I’m now off social media which was the place I received most of my news, it meant I had to hone the collections and feeds in Feedly.

This is my primary source to keep up with everything. The only difference I’m noticing is that I find many articles of interest but I can’t ‘share’ them anywhere (in the past, I would have shared them to Twitter). Now, I take some time to read, learn, delve and then write curated posts of interesting finds.

2. WordPress

This blog site comes a close second.

You’ll notice that I have been writing a post per day – sometimes two. Getting off social media has allowed my mind to expand a bit more where I just want to write to get the stuff out of it.

Most of the time, I’m simply just emptying my mind, waffling. I have started to write more personally, sharing bits of stuff of what’s happening in my life such as my knitting or what’s happening in our back yard even having a go at some fiction writing.

Other times, I write posts related to organisational learning like this one recently on Notification Literacy (a term by Doug Belshaw).

My blog is my personal reflection space and I can’t do without it in my life. It gives me mental clarity.

It is a part of ME.

3. YouTube

I have a YouTube channel where I review books and add my own little spin to them on “what you can learn through them” however, I make it clear that I don’t care about Likes, Follows, Shares and I tell people they DON’T have to subscribe. YouTube for me is my online CV – a visual portfolio of my work and learning (although I have Unlisted many of the Collections since 2016).

YouTube is a place where I share my thoughts, reflections and learning BUT I wrap them up in BOOK REVIEWS.

For example, I read about the secret coders of World War II recently and interspersed with the review, I showed how I learned Morse Code recently (thanks YouTube).

This has resulted in some unexpected turn of events where authors now are emailing me to review their books on their channel (which I respectfully decline because I have no idea about who’s actually watching – numbers, building a following, selling – has never been my game).

I am on YouTube daily – in fact, it’s also my preferred network of choice to watch shows (even though we have Netflix and Foxtel which remain untouched).

4. Telegram

I use Telegram as my preferred messaging app and over this last year I have added a whole heap of my trusted Twitter networks to it and we send messages to each other here and there. It’s nice to get to know them and their families a little bit more personally. I subscribe to Nik Peachy’s EdTech & ELT Updates on his Telegram Channel. (Yes you can create channels where you can send out to Subscribers) and I think it’s a great idea to have your own Channel here.

5. My Personal Email (My “Private” One)

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I would never have thought to put this into my Learning List – ever! Never!

However, isn’t it a strange turn of events that my personal email now is my place, my home. An email from a friend is akin to a welcome visitor who knocks on your door whom you haven’t seen for a long time.

If someone gives you their phone number and email address, I liken it to them giving you their trust that you won’t abuse them by sticking them on an emailing distribution list.

While my work email is out of control (never used to be like this as we still grapple with colleagues using multiple communication systems at work), my personal email is like my home – my sanctity. A place where I go to and see the “surprise visits” from my networks who share one small tidbit or just write to say “hello” or enquire about my well being.

My personal email, believe it or not has been part of my mental health and well being this year. Who would have thought??

6. Yammer

Yammer is Microsoft’s enterprise social network and one in which I have written a lot over the years on this blog. Standby to see more of it in organisations as Viva Engage. I have written about this in my recent post Yammer or Viva Engage: Same? Same?

Yammer & Viva Engage: Same? Same?

This platform is going to experience some huge changes and going to be part of Microsoft’s Employee Experience Platform.

One of the new things they’re adding is the Stories feature: short videos where employees can share their own posts and videos for up to 30 seconds. In a few months, I have been asked by Microsoft to run a webinar on how to use Stories for Business as I’ve been sharing these over the years since my own experimentations with the Stories features on social media since 2017.

Now that I am not on social media, all of my sharing happens within the enterprise social network Yammer so my colleagues are copping the brunt of my findings, reflections, observations, experiments, working out loud, lessons. In some way, this can be positive (it’s helped me connect more broadly with my colleagues overseas and identify areas for collaboration and co-creation) but negative in that all my thinking is ‘closed off’ from the outside world – and I have no personal record of it on my own platform.

Therefore, when it comes time to leave the company I work for, all my knowledge and work is still retained by the company.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that at 53 years old, if I don’t already know my stuff by now – how to find it, how to customise it in new ways for new endeavours – it’s not going to be of interest to others when I do leave. In fact, I would hazard to guess it’s unlikely to ever be accessed ever again and long forgotten in the anals of the cloud.

7. Microsoft Teams

I work for a Microsoft partner, so Teams is my choice for connecting with people through either running and participating in webinars, meetings, live events and conferences. It’s not my ‘preferred’ tool but it is simply the most handy tool I have available.

Besides, most people know how to use it as it’s the platform they use in their daily work. I’m using this tool for learning and connecting with people all around the world. Certainly all webinars I’ve attended as a participant for some training purpose has been on this tool.

8. Power App Portals (Custom Curation Boards for Organisations)

One of the things that has boosted my knowledge of Microsoft365 at work – and keeping up with news and announcements is a custom built tool called “Microsoft365 Community” developed by one of my colleagues, Loryan Strant in the Product Innovation team at our company, Rapid Circle.

Loryan has created this genius portal using Power Portal Apps that feeds curated blogs of people who share valuable and educational content on Microsoft365 applications and then a selected team of us at Rapid Circle (me included), read the content and then add our ‘value’ in a text field and assign it to an appropriate Microsoft product. In effect, Loryan has created a custom curation platform that works like ScoopIt at no cost – using only Microsoft applications using also a select group of people in the company who can offer their ‘value’ to each article.

The platform then feeds out to different customer sites who have paid for this service where they have access to our curated content through their SharePoint pages (eg intranet or other sites) that helps their employees develop and skill up on Microsoft 365 applications.

It’s quite a genius product and the daily curation of reading the posts that it collects every day has drastically increased my knowledge of what’s happening in the M365 world.

9. Curators (The Human Kind)

One of the things I have also done is to go through my list of Curators and double check that I’m still following them on Feedly.

People like Robin Goode, Mike Taylor, Stan Garfield and in particular, Stephen Downes is CONSTANT SOURCE OF EDUCATIONAL POSTS.

Their blogs are all in my Feedly account so this year, I have been catching up on some fantastic reading. Curators ARE EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE to do this service for others. They lessen my cognitive load to FIND articles of interest and I can be guaranteed that EVERY interaction with their sites means I come away EDUCATED and INFORMED.

If anything, this foray outside of social media has made me realise the IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN CURATORS. We don’t value these skills – and we SHOULD.

10. IndieWeb

Indieweb is a community of people building software to enable personal, independently hosted websites to independently maintain their social data on their own web domains rather than on large centralised platforms.

I’m only just exploring this and it’s opening up a whole new world of how people are trying to build systems of connecting and sharing that doesn’t involve handing over our data to marketers and algorithms. To be honest, it’s all a learning curve for me and at times in-depth.

I know my site has a lot of work to do in that space because for some reason (I have no idea why), Google Analytics tracks it. I’d like to get it to a point where there are no trackers – completely clean.

My lesson here is that social media, although started off innocent and hopeful, now shows to me how pervasive it has become in our lives. I have a long way to go with this and only just goes to show how immersed I was in it but now is the time to reclaim what I can.

Final Thoughts

So these are my learning tools for 2022 and in some way there are SURPRISES.

As I say goodbye to Twitter and social media, what has come in have been more HUMAN CENTRED approaches to getting and sharing my information. The algorithms have reduced! Yay!

It means to me that I have had to fight this ‘personal urge’ to constantly look at the metrics – how many times people have Liked a post or commented or shared. Instead, it has GIVEN ME BACK TIME to really hone in on REDUCING the content and FILTERING a lot more and really QUESTIONING what I should be writing about or learning.

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