Language education site Busuu emphasises the social side of learning a language. While Busuu has standard components such as vocabulary exercises with audio and writing units to test out your composition, the most interesting aspect is its ability to connect you with both people learning your language and native speakers of your language. You're learning Spanish and someone else is learning English? Connect through Busuu and help each other out. While Busuu may not be a substitute for the do-or-die learning of full language immersion, it has a wider range of tools and social interaction than a standalone program or book. For more chances to hone your language learning skills, check out Mango.

The Web is filled with great learning resources, ranging from YouTube clips to forum posts to helpful sites, but having to endlessly hunt through Google results doesn't always lead to a very structured educational experience. Australian start-up site Clivir aims to fill the gap by providing a system for creating structured lessons referencing existing content and your own expertise, and incorporating a social-network-style feedback and comments system. The content is a little sparse right now, but there's some useful suggestions for new iPhone owners and working with your camera flash, for instance. It would also be a useful way of creating a study group around a particular topic. Clivir is free to use, requires registration.

The Stanford Engineering Everywhere program offers online access to full courses in the school's engineering program—including classes in computer science and artificial intelligence. Courses include lecture videos, reading lists, handouts, quizzes, tests, and even a social network for fellow online students.

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On-demand video is now pretty standard on most international carriers, so airlines need to look for new ways to keep passengers amused. Fran Foo at Australian IT reports that one of the options Qantas will be offering on its new A380 services will be free business school content from Melbourne Business School, Harvard and Stanford, including full-length lectures and bite-sized interviews with business leaders. Does that seem to you like a good use of all that in-air time, or would you prefer to advance your business skills in a less crowded and noisy environment? Educate us in the comments. Photo from Qantas

Windows only: Free flash card creator and tester Teach2000 is a robust solution for those who believe in the power of learning through simple question/answer pairs. The software comes in both a "full" desktop version and a USB-portable copy, though both run basically the same. You enter question and answer pairs in a text box, separated by special characters or tabs, and can add second answers and notes to each item. As for testing, Teach2000 is better for subjects that involves exact answers, like numbers, dates, and programming code, but seems flexible enough to work in most any situation that paper flash cards would—and you can print those out too, of course. Teach2000 is a free download for Windows systems only. While you're self-testing, check out Brad Isaac's guide to making effective flash cards.

Microsoft's DreamSpark program, which offers free copies of its developer software to students, has been extended to Australia. Registered university and TAFE students (there's a verification process) can download free copies of numerous MS developer tools, including the big hitters Visual Studio and Expression Studio. Of course there's a not-so-hidden agenda here -- encouraging students to develop skills with MS platforms help ensure a corporate appetite for those tools. Nonetheless, those are good skills to have on your resume. (Those tools aren't small, so download them on campus or near the end of your ISP billing month to avoid chewing up too much of your cap.)

Self-educator Josh Kaufman says you can bypass business school an earn a "Personal MBA" by reading the best books in business—and he offers 77 of his picks. Kaufman writes:

Top MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List features only the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research. So skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

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If you've been learning to play the guitar online and are looking for a few more challenges, web site GuitarCardio generates easy, medium, and difficult exercises to help develop your stamina. Not only are the fully customizable workouts good for building your fretting muscles, but they'll also help you improve your chops for walking through scales and reading tabulature, the most common musical notation for guitars you'll run into on the web.

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Next time you need to quickly memorise a small piece of information, Wired suggests that you may actually have better luck retaining the information if you distract yourself.

In 2007, researchers asked UCLA students to try to memorize a set of 48 word pairs (country: Russia, fruit: lemon, flower: lily, etc.). After studying the list, some students then had to sit through a slide show and view closely related material (flower: rose). Guess what? The distracted students performed better on subsequent recall tests.

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I've just been playing with the pronunciation guide website Howjsay and really enjoying it. It has a slightly tinny English accented 'voice' which pronounces words for you from its dictionary.

It boasts over 97,000 words and it found several Spanish words for me (churros, burrito - yes I like Mexican food), as well as a couple of philosophers - the French Foucault and that German 'difficult to spell or pronounce' scallywag Nietzsche. When it looked up churros for me it gave both the English pronunciation and the Spanish pronunciation as well.

And it even had Lifehacker in its dictionary - aww!