The author starts with a good insight. "The slow and deliberate process of peer review means that papers in the published journal are a historic record, not the active literature of the field." Consequently, "For the NSDL, the conclusion is clear. We need to devise ways to identify and select the working literature, whether or not it has been formally reviewed, and to indicate to readers its probable quality." There are clues we can use to judge what is good, and the author runs through a representative set. But they are far from conclusive. A better approach seems to be typified by such sites as Epinions and Amazon where volunteers review the articles and readers review the reviewers. My advice to the author: you're half way there. Now think about how such a system could be formalized and placed within a metadata framework. The result is what I call "third party metadata" and it allows for a dynamic ranking of all sorts of online educational objects.
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