Scirus – science-specific search engine

http://www.scirus.com/

New to me was this search engine that focuses solely on sources of scientific information and returns results either from qualified web sites or from only scientific journals. It points to a different strategy for finding learning resources – highly constrained and vetted search catalogs that instead of relying on metadata simply use good search engines on the already qualified catalog. Some might claim that this falls into the same human scalability trap as Yahoo-style directories, but in my mind it is actually the happy medium between such directories and full-scale internet searching that has little or no knowledge of the quality of the information and relies on (falliable, vis a vis the ‘pagerank blog effect‘)algorithmic techniques like ‘pagerank‘ to calculate the relevancy of a resource…

The reference comes from a post by Joe Hart of Eastern Oregon University. The entire post is well worth a read as it details Joe’s reflections on faculty awareness of learning objects and their current search and reuse patterns based on Joe’s experiences delivering a faculty workshop on just these topics. In addition to running this weblog, Joe has built and maintains the EduResources Portal, a site that aggregates annotated references to both discipline-specific and institutional repositories as well as resources on the use and creation of learning objects. – SWL