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The video game World of Warcraft was the text studied, the laboratory, and the classroom for the online course "Warcraft: Culture, Gender, and Identity" at Inver Hills Community College.

The overarching goals of the course involved using the game's immersive environment, learning strategies, and culture to encourage and support student learning.

In addition to achieving the intended course outcomes, students successfully transferred the concepts they learned between the real and the virtual worlds.

According to Jeff King, in 10 years people are going to have a new understanding about the true value of the learning management system (LMS)--as a tool for keeping track of learning outcomes.

If it's so great, why do only 80 percent of the faculty at Texas Christian use the LMS? Why not all of them? King wants to do all he can to get those one in five holdouts into the fold, short of a mandate by the faculty senate. That effort involves a multi-pronged effort encompassing faculty training, excellent technical support, a pedagogical refocus on learning outcomes, and ultimately allowing students to pressure faculty to use the LMS.

Mixable, is positioned as an e-learning environment that empowers students, and can be used as a little study room and course library inside Facebook.

Drawing on course registration data, Mixable invites students in virtual rooms with classmates in each of their courses. Once there, it lets them post and start comment threads about links, files, and other materials that might be relevant to the course — or not. The point is, there is no administrative authority determining what should (or must) be posted or discussed, and students are free to abstain from participating — just like on Facebook. Professors can join in, but they don’t run the show. And students can choose to make posts viewable by some classmates and not others. “In essence, the conversation is owned by the student,” says Kyle Bowen, the director of informatics at Purdue.

Purdue CIO Gerry McCartney says it made sense to position it as an application within Facebook. He cites the quote attributed to the bank robber Willie Sutton who, asked why he robbed banks, said "because that’s where the money is." Says McCartney: “So why go to Facebook? Because that’s where the students are.”

People organically develop their PLNs when chosing to participate in social media like Twitter, Facebook , blogs, and through learning networks like Classroom 2.0.

I believe students should experience their success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information. Author of For the Love of Learning.

This resource will direct you to a variety of resources on this approach, the research behind it, and how you can use it in your class to transform your students into engaged and interested independent thinkers.

Can a videogame teach you to be a better person? Given that many centre around shooting people in the face, that might seem ridiculous. But games have been used for centuries to teach skills: it is theorised that chess was developed as a training tool for Persian army officers.

Dr. D Hello, My primary research interests are measuring the impacts of culturally relevant digital audio workstation environments for learning and exploring the uses of Web 2.0 technologies for learning.

Colleges no longer simply want to know what their students know, but how they think.

Higher-order thinking skills are "something that schools are paying a little bit more attention to these days," says Jeffrey Steedle, a measurement scientist at the Council for Aid to Education, whose Collegiate Learning Assessment essays are used at several hundred colleges to test students' abilities to synthesize arguments and write persuasively. "It's largely in response to the recognition that these skills are needed to be competitive in the global marketplace."

But educators also say that paper-and-pencil examinations have limits—for one thing, knowing that you are being tested can drag down performance—and they are looking for new methods to measure skills like critical thinking, creativity, and persistence.