Jane Hart publishes an excellent blog - E-Learning Pick of the Day - and once again she is calling readers to submit their top ten tools. Here's mine.
Jane has compiled these into a very interesting Top 100 tools. Many of these tools are free; for example, in my list is Windows Live Writer and Google Reader.
I think this a gold mine for self-directed learners.
Not so long ago I referenced a video of a table-top drawing device. Two of my sons are bloggers and my younger son, Robin, shared this video with me:
This ingenious and simple, opening all kinds of collaborative and teaching possibilities. Well done to Johnny Chung Lee of Carnegie Mellon!
Since moving to Office 2007 I've been experimenting with authoring these posts from OneNote 2007 and Word 2007. One problem I did find was that I needed to retrofit Technorati tags. 
Now Windows Live Writer Beta 2 has been launched, and it provides a much more flexible interface. Also I was pleased to see a rich set of plug-ins including ...
You can read more about Windows Live Writer and download it on the Windows Live Writer blog. So I'm migrating back to this tool now.
My colleague and friend Jean Morgan asked me whether I still used a Tablet PC.
I certainly do. I started with the Toshiba M200, which is an excellent machine. However, I 
broke it. Not that it is fragile; its quite resilient in fact. It’s just that I got impatient one day with the response and just unplugged it to restart. [Note: Never do that to a PC.] When it reloaded, I found I couldn’t load up Office software, which was pretty fundamental in my case.
So I replaced it with an IBM (now Lenovo) ThinkPad X41. I’m also very happy with this.
The main differences for me between the two machines are:
Because of the portability issues in the way I use my Tablet, even when the Tosh comes back from the Tablet hospital, I think I’ll stick with the ThinkPad.
Finally, my pen use has gravitated to just three applications:
My recent post declared my love affair with the Moleskine and how I felt that I had to excuse myself to the ‘technoscenti’ out there who read blogs. I suppose one of the reasons why I appreciate the blogging world (the so-called ‘blogosphere’) is the delightful discovery of like minds.
Here’s what I’ve discovered. Like me, there are people:
century.
(GTD);’ (to use a phrase from one of Julia Cameron’s books) and try to live in the tension of this with 1 and 3.It is encouraging to discover like-minded souls this way. It helps me persuade myself that I’m not too eccentric (even for a Brit), or even some kind of geek-y freak.
Yet there is something more to it than that. Coming from the West and having built up a small professional services company from being solo, I have become aware of something of the strength of individualism in my culture and thus in myself. At times this individualism informs my personal, day-to-day choices more than I am ready to admit. At a deep level, though, this is not really satisfying. It is not enough to live as a technical hermit. The human soul has a universal pull towards community, to meet with the like-minded. I’ve come to realise that much of my sense of fulfilment in life comes from relationships that energise me by affirming, accepting, and encouraging me. As trust levels grow there is the added fulfilment is when these people, with whom I feel safe, can challenge and stretch me. I really have learned to value it when a trusted friend corrects me.
In the case of my own organisation, Pearce Mayfield, perhaps the main source of satisfaction for me has been to surround myself with such people; sometimes I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. And these colleagues are like-minded, but have quite different strengths, personalities and giftedness. Such are the deeper rewards of community in business.
I’ve been an active participant in the blogosphere now for about a year and a half. During that time it has been good to make and connect with friends who cover one or more of the above bullet list. It’s interesting to reflect that it has defined me somewhat as well as the blog community of which I have come to feel a part.
It seems that my last post ('The Ultimate Meetings Management Tool?') has created some favourable buzz in the blogosphere. Hobart Swan, has started up a good blog recently on MindManager applications, references this use of MindManager with the Tablet PC as quoted in Marc Orchant and James Kendrick's Tablet PC podcast.
Their references are very warm, especially from Marc in the podcast. But really, I can't believe nobody's thought of this mix of technologies before. This has made me think...
Perhaps it is the mix of technologies and some new application of the mix that creates a performance breakthrough. This is brought out nicely in Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog where she posts, "Why I want a TabletPC". She has come (like me) to the mix by first being a convinced Mind Mapper. But when she encountered the mix of a Tablet PC, Mind Mapping and Mind Manager used to capture lecture notes, she had a 'Wow!' moment.
Mind Mapping, thanks to Tony Buzan, has been around for at least four decades. I was coached in the mid-90's by Tony's colleague, Vanda North, and my early responses to computer-based Mind Mapping were fairly equivocal. Even when MindManager X5 was first launched, I felt it lost some visual versatility ... but that was until I mixed pen technology through a Tablet PC. What a mix!
Yesterday I chaired the quarterly meeting of our training consultants in London. I always look forward to these meetingsl each colleague is a star and as a team we sharpen each other up and complement each other's strengths and weaknesses. For the most part, the trainer's lot is a solitary one: weeks on end delivering training in various parts of the world, with very little connection with their peer community. I look forward to these meetings with great anticipation.
