Spent some wonderful time today with our education librarian, Brad Carrington. I had a specific purpose related to our College's dissertations, but we stumbled onto an area that I think can be really helpful in the future ... query-based rss feeds from educational datasets.
So, here is the "educational law" query rss feed from the ERIC database ... and ... there are some surprisingly useful things in there. I added it to my Google Reader. You can also search by author, so here is the RSS for "Bathon" using an author search (yeah, I know not a lot is indexed). But, here is the author RSS for Martha McCarthy (which is much more useful). Anyway, you get the picture.
Some other datasets are now incorporating this feature, like dissertation abstracts (login required), but not all are there yet. The legal databases have sort of been there for a while with their alerts features, but I find those less useful than the RSS feeds, which I can have in my e-mail like the alerts, but I can also put in my reader, embed on a blog, put on my facebook page, etc.
Use your own search terms to create your own RSS feeds and then put them in your reader.