I'm in the middle of a quest to find the "perfect" suite of personal learning tools--the "must-haves." Here's what I'm sure needs to be there:

• RSS

• Google Reader

• Google Alerts

The other piece I think needs to be there is some way to process information and reflect on it, which is where I think blogging comes into it. But there are several considerations here:

• It needs to be easy to use.

• It needs to be something that people feel they can personalize in some way.

• It needs to provide for a variety of ways to post to fit in with people's different work styles--I'm looking for a way to really embed reflection and learning into daily life and work, so it can't just be something that you do at a computer. 

• Ideally, people should have the ability to post multimedia--particularly videos and audio. If it's going to be a personal learning environment/learning log, there are lots of online pieces that we need to be able to embed.
  

• Tagging is important as a way to organize information and materials so it can be found.
  

• One thing I like about Vox is the ability to combine both public and private posts in a variety of ways--and they can be applied to individual posts, so I could use a Vox blog to write about everything, including how much my co-workers are annoying me. The different privacy settings also let me connect to different networks so I could share things with one group, but not another.
  

I've also thought about Tumblr as a sort of "gateway drug" into blogging. There's no commenting feature, but as a sort of multimedia learning log, it has advantages. It also invites shorter posts, which could feel less intimidating to people. Another advantage of Tumblr is its integration with Jott so that you could do audio posts from your cell that then are transcribed into text with a link to the audio. That seems attractive as a sort of "on-the-go" learning option. Vox offers the ability to post via email, which is attractive, but not as good an option as voice posting, particularly since I think a lot of people would like the voice option. Of course G-Cast could help solve that problem.

What I'm looking for here is a way to give people a sort of "PLE Starter Pack"--those 2-3 tools that will get the lion's share of things done for you. Then you can add on as necessary. So it's the "Must Haves" vs. the "Nice to Haves" from a learning perspective. I also think it's about getting it down to minimal tools and they need to be seriously easy to use.

practicing posting from my email to vox