Educational Information Sources Online

I've designed two new blogs, as companions to my Web Tools Workshop and my Educational Uses of Weblogs Workshop. Here they are:

Web Tools

Presentation Blog 

Connexions is a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help

• authors publish and collaborate
• instructors rapidly build and share custom courses
• learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines.

Our Content Commons contains small "knowledge chunks" we call modules that connect into courses. Thanks to a Creative Commons open license, anyone can take our materials, adapt them to meet their needs, and contribute them back to the Commons. And everyone is invited to participate!

I have a thing for portals and dictionaries and databases. Of course, I'm a librarian. Cornell Law School has a free law dictionary site just for you :)

The Open Access Toolbar allows users to find scholarly information that is free on the Internet. Some of the features include:

This information retrieval resource from University of Michigan  allows you to search  collections of freely available, academically-oriented web resources, including online books, full-text journal articles, images, and audiovisual files. Directory of Open Access Journals: DOAJ covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. Currently 461 journals are searchable at article level. FindArticles:  FindArticles includes magazine and journal articles from more than 900 publications, dating from 1998 through to the present. Many of the millions of articles in FindArticles can be read in their entirety and printed at no cost.

CLUSTY is the newest search engine idea, that goes beyond meta-searching (such as Dogpile, which offers results from multiple search engines in one query). The idea is to group your search results into clusters that are connected and in a heirarchal format. Try it. Very interesting. You can see your FAQs answered here.

The link to this compilation of information about teaching critical thinking skills was posted on one of my library listservs. I thought it ties in nicely with information literacy skills education. There are articles, ideas, rubrics and more.

I found this site, somehow, I can't remember now how I came across it. Oh, someone linked to my other site via this and I saw it in my stats. It's a search engine for grabbing archived (cached?) website information. Kind of a neat concept. Still experimenting with the Internet Archive WaybackMachine. Cool name in any case. I think it would be useful if you have a date or dates you viewed info but can't remember the URLs, etc.

    The ArchiveGrid is a portal where one can search through information on archives all around the world. Plug in your search terms and see what comes up. This site would be invaluable to serious researchers. Here's what they say on the site:

ArchiveGrid is an important destination for searching through historical documents, personal papers, and family histories held in archives around the world.

Thousands of libraries, museums, and archives have contributed nearly a million collection descriptions to ArchiveGrid. Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the many items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies.

ArchiveGrid is available to both individuals and institutions free of charge through May 31st. If additional grants funds or sponsorship are obtained, ArchiveGrid will remain free of charge; otherwise subscriptions will be available for institutions and individuals alike.

George Emery at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY has compiled a wonderful listing of timeline links on the web.

The Arts and Sciences Libraries at the University at Buffalo has posted a page of resources for Earth Day this year. Included are the history, global climate change, biodiversity, Love Canal information and links to Internet resources on the topic.