On good learning tech…

We need new language / categories for talking about technologies designed to enhance, excite, enable, and engender learning.

On the one hand we have "ed tech", which is more an industry and conference circuit; on the other, we have an invisible layer of tools we don't explicitly think of as for learning, even if they are!

I like to take, as a simple starting point, "learning technology" — encompassing things like tech for enabling environments, augmented reading, collaborative platforms, rich social spaces and more.

I almost called this a catalog of good learning tech, because I think an explorable collection for this should exist. But for now, an initial list of products and companies I think are doing legitimately interesting and meaningful work to support learning!

Moonrise — creative learning environments for homeschoolers that look amazing, with nice spaces and tools for projects

Arena — platform for curating / sharing collections of things like links, images, and PDFs, used by lots of educators

Antimatter — p2p memes and games for classroom learning

Val Town & Replit — tools that make coding fun, easy, and more social

Pathwright — one of the only online course platforms that's at all interesting, designed by actual educators

Kinopio — playful canvas for thinking and linking

YouTube — in a surprisingly real sense; perhaps the best search engine for tacit knowledge

Figma & tldraw — shared canvas tools, useful in flexible ways for facilitating and more

Obsidian — powerful and flexible notes app…start with plaintext notes; make it yours with all sorts of extensions

Of course there are plenty more — a more expansive list would include hardware devices, and even things like "paper" and "the great outdoors" and "conversational frameworks".

Maybe we'll build the full catalog eventually. What categories should it have? What tools and technologies would you add to the list?