I have often recommended academic.live.com by Microsoft as a worthy rival to Google Scholar. At the very least, it was superior in its interface and sorting capabilities. Unfortunately, it provided much less relevant results in the humanities (focusing on more recent publications).

Great news for anybody out there who's using the free bibliography too l Zotero! With what I'm assuming was a small upgrade to the catalogue software, Zotero can now see results on the page of the catalogue and import them into the bibliography with just one click (individually or as a group).

A very interesting article that asks all the right questions about current trends in educational technology innovation. It implies the central problem which is the essential conflict of interest at the heart of institutional IT services: 1. keep the services running, 2. provide the best available technology to the institution. But 1. is in conflict with 2. IT services get blamed when printers stop working or email goes down so naturally they will prefer to stick to maintaining these basic infrastructures rather than try to innovate.

CARE has a long hisotry of tracking the unfulfilled promises of technology in education. Here's a link to an article (from 2000) that suggests some reasons for this, as well as some solutions.

One of the significant complaints about Wikipedia is that there is no reliable way to assess the quality of an individual entry. A new research shows that the length of the article is a very good indicator of quality. Entries longer than 1,830 (or about 2,000) words, i.e. the length of a decent essay, are usually fairly good quality.

An interesting discussion was sparked by an article in the Guardian about the problems with Google search. 

The public purse is involved in the production of a cornucopia of materials that could be used for education in one way or another. Even where they are publicly available, they are hard to find and prioritise. A project combining the ethos and technologies of the Wikipedia and Ubuntu undertakings might be just the solution.

Overstream is a great new online service that makes online video even more educationally interesting.  All it does is allow people to add subtitles to clips on YouTube, Google Video with plans for adding more video services. Adding subtitles to video has always been one of the hurdles for their use.

"I blame the educational system" says, like so many, a leading computing pundit, and legend John C. Dvorak in his latest column. This is the core of his argument:

It's Time for Universal Computer Education - Columns by PC Magazine