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"Our surveys showed that while laptop computers can be a distraction, students of this generation feel that they are capable of productive multitasking," Samson said.

Through LectureTools, laptops serve as robust "clickers," providing drastically more interaction than the class polling that clicker-based student response systems offer.

LectureTools also allows students to take notes directly on lecture slides. Students can anonymously ask the instructor's aide a question through a chat window during class, and others can see these questions and answers. Students can also rate their own understanding of each slide, giving the professor valuable feedback.

Come to think of it, the Arizona law doesn't go far enough: People with accents should be banned from any profession that involves communication. Politics, for instance. Henry Kissinger's accent would surely qualify for the ban. And let's not stop with the foreign-born: Ban all accents. Southern accents, for instance, or Yankee ones. Actually, there isn't anyone who speaks without an accent, so let's just ban communicating altogether. This would be a much better country if everyone just kept quiet and handed his proof of citizenship to the police.

Could a female character, perhaps older, with a few battle scars, or some gritty humor added to her appearance, be suitable for Gears of War? If such a character were designed, could she possibly appeal to potential female gamers and males as well? If she were portrayed with the same respect and visual interest as the rest of the cast, females may be more inclined to give a game like Gears of War a chance.

we talk a lot about games being based on films. Mass Effect 2 isn’t. Mass Effect’s structure is far closer to a television series – and not necessarily one with the tight MUSTWATCHEVERYEPISODEORYOUWILLNOTUNDERSTANDAFUCKINGTHING structure that’s currently popular in geek-media. The semi-loose one. There’s a main plot, sure… but an episode is an episode. I found myself thinking about Firefly as much as Battlestar Galactica, as the recruitment and loyalty missions acted as spotlight episodes on each characters, at first introducing and then resolving them in our minds. Each character’s loyalty mission is, basically, as Firefly’s Jaynestown is for Jayne. The final suicide mission is the equivalent of the double-length season finale. When viewed through this prism, the finale seems far less truncated.

to move toward "original content" is to move in exactly the wrong direction. People are hungry, they are positively salivating, for sites that intelligently dissect the plethora of sites that in turn deal with sites, books, music, and sites on sites. In every other medium critics write from secondary, tertiary, even quaternary degrees of removal. The critics analyse the original content, sure; but then the critics are themselves analysed; and then that analysis is analysed by someone else; and then the real genius wakes up, carbonates his own cola product, turns on his computer, and analyses the shit out of everything that preceded him. And that's what students write awesome, timeless papers about.

In April 2010, Twitter had approximately 106M registered users. The volume of data that flows through the Twitter pipe dwarfs any other publicly available linguistic corpus in existence (except the web itself), and unlike fixed corpora, it still flows. Such a huge dataset has proven itself to be a fertile resource for a number of natural language processing tasks (such as trend detection and sentiment analysis), but its value as a collection of colloquial language begs to be used for lexicography as well: if the purpose of a dictionary is to record actual usage, then Twitter data allows us to broaden the scope of our corpus beyond newswire, literary works and other forms of privileged publication and include the unedited language of everyday folks as well.

Practomime leverages the advantages of role-playing games for immersive learning. Role-playing games (including popular MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or The Lord of the Rings Online) rely on a player's investment in a created character or avatar and require the player to complete difficult tasks (quests) and problem-solve to overcome obstacles, in order to progress through the "levels" of the game.

As has been pointed out, role-playing games are the perfect assessment machines: you can't get to the next level without mastering the previous one, and you get constant feedback.

Roger Travis, U of Connecticut

Travis suggests that this type of "assessment machine" can be easily translated into a learning game. "The first step is to realize it is possible to make course objectives and game objectives the same." Then:

• Create a storyline for an "alternate reality" in which students are tasked for some urgent narrative reason with learning the information and developing the skills required by the course
• Insert course activities into that narrative framework
• Have students create characters within that virtual reality, characters who have a stake in solving the problems/assignments given and achieving the objectives of the game and the course
• Assign credit for assignments in the form of "levels" or "experience points" within the game

You're not allowed to play the game for yourself, so interaction with the developers or PR person gives you an artificial idea of how easy, or hard, the game is to play. "The worst is PR flacks who are kibitzing as you're playing, telling you exactly which buttons to press at which times. Half the fun for me is figuring out a game's mechanics, which is impossible if you're standing over my shoulder and telling me which buttons to press at which moments," McElroy says. "Stop it. Also, stop telling me that you're shocked at how well I'm doing or that I'm the best player that day. I know what you're doing."

Games are the only creative form - the only art form perhaps - where creators are banned from making works specifically for adults or dealing with exclusively adult themes. Given the average computer game player is about my age it should be no surprise that the government is being lobbied hard by gamers advocating a change of law.

But do I think games are art? Frankly I'm not sure it's the right question.

Like all Star Wars games, Republic Commando has a much easier time telling its story because it doesn’t have to explain itself to anyone. We already know what the Trade Federation is and why these droids are attacking us. The game barely even has a main villain, you just see General Grievous once before having to fend off his rave-party bots. Even if you did manage to shield your eyes from the prequels, it’s not like you have to infuse an FPS with an intense personal motivation for the player. A bunch of people are shooting at you, people understand that it’s best to fire back. The dialogue instead mostly consists of you and your squadmates talking. Rather than getting sucked into the usual video game banter of personal motivation or why we have to kill the evil wizard, the Commandos just talk about what’s going on around them. The game doesn’t have to waste time explaining a lot of intricate details that aren’t really relevant anyways.