But around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: Printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books was distracting readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention. Printers “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness,” wrote Erasmus in the early 16th century, in the kind of tirade that might seem familiar to anyone exhausted by what they find online today.

Keep things in perspective...

“Now it seems quite obvious because I’m older,” he said. “But, eventually, I gave up. I didn’t think the answer was important enough to be on Google.” Benjamin is one of 83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11, who participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information.

Like other children, Benjamin was frustrated by his lack of search skills or, depending on your view, the limits of search engines.

Interesting piece here on how Google and engineers are attempting to learn from the "discovery" based model that teens and children often employ as a starting point for their homework or search engine experiences.

Personally, I think we do a great disservice to our students by not encouraging them to use Google, Wikipedia, etc as a part of their learning process.

Rather than walling off these resources, it's our job as teachers to position homework or questions in such a way to encourage discovery via a number of avenues including Google, Wikipedia, personal reflection, "wisdom" (or lack thereof) of the masses, niche web communities, etc.

Knowing how to search (both on Google and in the rest of life) will increasingly be a valuable skill that we should be better cultivating in our schools.

My perennial "Favorite Website of the Year" is once again Arts and Letters Daily, a product of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

If you don't read this site (I'm not talking about via RSS or Twitter... I mean as your start page on each new tab), you're missing out on an amazing learning experience.

I'm going out on a limb and predicting that ALDaily.com will be my favorite site of the year in '10 ("twenty-ten" or "two thousand and ten"?) as well.