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.

iBreadCrumbs.com offers a simple way for students to record their online research and share their results with others. It works by installing a toolbar in Firefox (version 2 only so far) that can be turned on when you're doing research and collects websites you find relevant.

Another reason why everyone should be using Firefox - you can improve your browsing experience so much with so many handy extensions. This one will pronounce words for you. This is particularly handy for academics who often run into words that are said outloud only infrequently (and this goes for both native and non-native speakers).