LearnHub (formerly Nuuvo) relaunched recently as an interesting social learning and teaching space. Although it provides space for schools, it is particularly interesting for individual learners and teachers who can create communities and learn from each others.

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).

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.

Here's an interesting article on the consequences of reading news online. Dvorak claims that by the increased ability to customise once consumption of information, individuals will loose the serendipidity of discovering information outside their immediate interest and the society as a whole will lose one of its sources of internal cohesion.

Mind maps are a useful visualisation tool but they are not that easy to create. Text2Mindmap makes it easy to convert a simple tab list into a JPG image. Its greatest limitation is that more complicated maps don't easily fit into one picture.

Futurelab held a meeting about the future of education with respect to building new schools and using technology. Below are some of the questions they asked themselves in their group discussion exercise.

Daisy Whitney in her latest New Media Minute reports on a recent investment craze in online video How-To sites. Whitney focuses on the relatively mundane aspects of how-to: how to kiss, how to cook, etc. but a closer look at the online video space reveals interesting educational opportunities.