How Online Research Can Make The Grade

"....just as the academic community has started to accept the inevitability of sites like Wikipedia, the Web is also about to foist what may be the biggest complexity it has encountered since the advent of the free-for-all encyclopedia. As the school year starts, the recent proliferation of question-and-answer sites--like the brainy Quora and the soon-to-be-everywhere Facebook Questions--may prove to be students' next last-ditch time-saver and teachers' next digital bogeyman." Read more on C/Net.

Students who use wikipedia don't want their professors to know

Surprise! Most students use Wikipedia at some point during their research on a paper or project, and they usually do so early on in the process. Online peer-reviewed journal First Monday recently published the findings of its research on student Wikipedia use and said that the service often serves as a starting point for the students who use it, allowing them to gather information for further investigation elsewhere. This is despite the fact that their professors still frown on Wikipedia use—but it seems that students believe what their profs don't know won't hurt them.

Wikipedia to color-code untrustworthy text

From eSchoolNews.com: Starting this fall, you'll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia, Wired reports: An optional feature called "WikiTrust" will color-code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.