(2019-08-30) Melcher Top Ten Tools

Matthias Melcher: Top ten tools. All my tools are Jane Hart’s category 1 (own personal and professional learning). As previously, I tagged them with LTM (Extension of Long-Term Memory), STM (Extension of Short-Term Memory and I/O (Input/ Output)

4. Condensr.de (my own tool): for quickly capturing associations and rearranging items to shorten the distance between related ones, such that new connections can more easily be seen.

Last year I did not spend as much time as before with Cmap and PBworks (previously 7. and 9. — despite I still like them). Rather, I invested more time in exploring and using a special kind of tools.

Idiosyncratic Tools

There are some less popular tools that might be called ‘idiosyncratic’, such as my own tool, or gRSShopper, or FedWiki, or Luhmann’s Zettelkasten.

All of these differ from the mainstream tools in a certain same way: You notice that they were crafted for the developers’ own use, and tailored to their recurring real needs, not as a fixed offering that exploits low-hanging fruit

The idiosyncratic tools are often quite simple and universally applicable (more like Notepad or a sheet of paper). Their strength is not the shiny designed features, but more general affordances and opportunities for adaptation.

Like WordPress, the Federated Wiki (8.) can also be used locally (thanks to @holden’s post), not only on a public server (where this description is useful). After a short learning phase, I started to notice the charm that comes with the short, modular, and hence well connectable, pages.

The gRSShopper (7.) fascinated me so much that I created several posts and some pictures.