How can the revealed research agenda, E-bookmarks and a critical review template aid the practitioner?

Continuing professional development requires engineers and educators to maintain lifelong learning. Both roles require the professional to research. Because of its immediacy and freshness, the authors cautiously accept that the initial port of call is the World Wide Web. Now, how should professionals find and manage relevant material in this proverbial haystack called the Web? This paper asks and answers three closely related questions: What is the practitioner´s hidden research agenda? How can electronic bookmarks (E-bookmarks) be used as an academic tool? How can a template be used for critical reviews? Professionals are unconsciously looking for the names of the authors who are working in the field, and who may have put abstracts of research work on the Web. This paper first reveals this hidden agenda for searching, and shows how to formalize the process. An E-bookmark is a computer record containing minimally the location, date and title of a page found on the Web, intranet or hard drive while following the search agenda. The paper next reveals how E-bookmarks may be annotated, sequenced, structured and used to keep track of all relevant electronic literature. Finally, the paper shows how E-bookmarks can be extended to keep track of relevant printed literature via a record and review template.