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This is a strange way for an animal to spend its days. Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities—eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter, and teaching our children. Instead, 2-year-olds pretend to be lions, graduate students stay up all night playing video games, young parents hide from their offspring to read novels, and many men spend more time viewing Internet pornography than interacting with real women. One psychologist gets the puzzle exactly right when she states on her Web site: "I am interested in when and why individuals might choose to watch the television show Friends rather than spending time with actual friends."

One solution to this puzzle is that the pleasures of the imagination exist because they hijack mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure. We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don't distinguish them from real ones.

Competing for the top spot on Twitter is a zero-sum game. The rise of one hashtag leads to the fall of another as Tweeters vie for public attention, and this fickle fame-game had dire consequences for the Iranian democratic movement in late June 2009, when Michael Jackson's death eliminated its Twitter presence at a critical moment.

The concern about technology (in its entirety, rather than one tool or another) was summed up in a series of statistics reviewed by both professors showing that increasing numbers of college students are not prepared for work at the college level. At that point, the presenters asked: If technology is helping us teach better, why are we seeing so much evidence that students aren’t learning as well as we would like? Current college students have had more exposure to technology in high school and college than previous generations did, but are they better off for it?

RateMyProfessors.com has its own vocabulary, its own values and its own idiosyncrasies. Success on the site is a badge of something. It’s just not immediately clear what. As a result, Rate My Professors is best consulted “for novelty purposes only,” as the tag on bad fake-ID cards used to read.

Students should not base decisions about their education on it, believing (mistakenly) that they always know how to filter information on wiki sites. And professors should not get ideas from it, believing (mistakenly) that it represents the wisdom of crowds. The top professors on Rate My Professors, after all, are not the top professors in the nation. Rather, they’re the top professors on RateMyProfessors.com.

Games could also be a powerful means of differentiating instruction (by, say, adapting the quest to the learner's abilities) and personalizing -- putting the learner directly into the content they're studying. Richard Wainess of UCLA explained that something as simple as using the words "I" and "you" in a lesson -- saying "You look up and see clouds" vs. "There are clouds in the sky" -- yields significantly better learning outcomes. Learning through games is, almost by definition, learning by doing.

There's even some evidence that games, if designed right, can encourage kids to use more positive social behavior

technology is changing so fast, privacy protection rules, laws and guidelines can't keep up. Kraglund-Gauthier and Young say there's no magic bullet when it comes to privacy protection. But they do say students and educators - and indeed everyone using the Internet - should become aware of the pitfalls, and work to minimize them.

One major pitfall relates to the international character of the Internet. If a Canadian institution stores data on a server in another country - something that's increasingly common because it can be a way to save money - then it becomes difficult to enforce Canadian privacy laws.

The notion that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” is the sentiment of someone who’s never had to code-switch, someone who’s never had to be in the closet for fear of getting kicked out of the house, someone who’s familiar with the world of white-collar “networking” in which bosses are expected to have semi-social bonds with their employees rather than the world of enforced hierarchy in which bosses are on the lookout for off-the-job indiscretions to punish or exploit. For many, many people, having more than one identity isn’t a sign of “lack of integrity” because it’s not even really a personal choice. It’s the only way to survive in a world that isn’t always perfectly willing to accept and respect them for who they are.

Phenomenology, or the study of how we experience things, works on the assumption that numerous sensations make-up our personal experiences. In games there are three basic ways we experience architecture: as game design, as a personalized space, or through a hybrid of the two. An excellent essay by Laurie N. Taylor highlights the difference between an actual experienced space in a game and one where the space is purely an exercise in design. (”Toward A Spatial Practice in Video Games”, Gameology, 21 June 2005) In the game Super Mario Brothers, you largely only move to the right. Everything in the game exists to impede progress, usually requiring you to jump around. All spaces in the game are hostile, and we never have to conceive of them as anything other than obstacles. Contrast that to a game like Metroid where you will be traversing two long hallways in between zones for most of the game. You get to know those hallways. You think of them as a hub, a spot that means something besides just turn right to avoid danger. That’s when the transition from design into personalized space begins to happen.

In non-horror games it's easy to use combat as the defining gameplay mechanic because there's no need to keep mysterious the beasts lurking in the shadows. In horror, the moment when a monster becomes familiar is when the tension and dread begins to deflate. There's no limit to fear of the unknown, but as soon as an enemy is quantifiable the boundaries are drawn. Fear will eventually become supplanted with frustration or, worse, tedium.

The very absurdity of the global digital system is revealing itself. It created all the instruments for global access and, then, turned around and arbitrarily restricted its commercial use, paving the way for piracy. Think about it: our broadband networks now allow seamless streaming of films, TV shows, music and, soon, of a variety of multimedia products; we have created sophisticated transaction systems; we are getting extraordinary devices to enjoy all this; there is a growing English-speaking population that, for a significant part of it, is solvent and eager to buy this globalized culture and information. But guess what? Instead of a well-crafted, smoothly flowing distribution (and payment) system, we have these Cupertino, Seattle or Los Angeles-engineered restrictions.