The amount of information that is online and potentially relevant to learners is enormous. Finding, selecting and judging relevant online content are important competencies in a world where lifelong learning is becoming a must. In practice, online content is the subject of economic, cultural and language filtering, arising from design features such as browsers, commercial search engines, portals, and intellectual property protected software. Local knowledge becomes more vulnerable and less easy to find on the web. Filtering of online content may affect the mind-map of e-learners and diminish the independence of their opinions in school, university or the industrial workplace.

This book highlights the economic, cultural and language filtering of online content. This book contains contributions from a team of international experts working together in the European FILTER see www.filternetwork.org. They present their research findings and experiences from practice. In the last part of the book key insights towards cultural inclusiveness of online content and its policy implications are described. Promising initiatives to safeguard cultural inclusiveness through weblogs, open source, minority languages tools, semantic web, and personalization options are discussed. The book includes hands-on recommendations for policymakers, managers and practitioners at work or at school.

With contributions by the following experts: Viive Aasma, Kalin A. Anev, Mary Bolger, Sylvia G.M. van de Bunt-Kokhuis PhD (editor), Justin Fenech, Henrik Hansson PhD, Tore Hoel, Kate Hutchings, Prof. Wim Liebrand PhD, Claudio Menezes, Klaasbert Moed, Mihkel Pilv, Jan Atle Toska, , Prof. David Weir PhD, Wilhelm Widmark and Paul Wouters PhD.