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These Web-based tools can help you connect to learning resources, network with your peers and enhance productivity.
Welcome to 2010 - and our top 10 Internet resources that are useful, free, and can help you network within education, save time, and remain current on research. Let 2010 be your year of the idea! work, life and technology balance.
Personal learning networks
Our first half of the top 10 all share a common theme - they fall into the "Personal Learning Network" (PLN) category. This is no accident. In addition to being yet another three-letter acronym, a PLN is essentially a customized, user-created set of connections that users design to meet their particular needs at a given point in time. They are intended to be fluid, dynamic networks that evolve based on changing conditions and emergent patterns of interactions between the users.
While each of the items in our list have some unique features - and many were not specially designed for an education setting - they all share the common features of connecting the user to others and to resources that can be used for learning purposes.
1. Twitter
It should come as no su rprise that Twitter tops our list of the top 10 for 2010. Nielsen . com ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in its category, with growth of 1,382 percent in the short month of February 2009 (McCarthy, 2009). Twitter is a site that aggregates messages of no more than 140 characters onto a user-created Web page. Other users can "follow" those updates. There are a variety of ways to configure settings for private or public posting.
Twitter was one of the first simple Web applications to truly leverage mobile technology, as the design and settings were based on the framework of text messaging from cell phones. Even without Internet access, a user could text an update to his profile to share. Users can also set their cell phones to send them a text message when others post updates. In other words, the Web site was essentially a way to create groups for text message distribution.
As time has gone by, a number of features have been added to allow for re-posting, direct messaging, sending Twitter updates to other...