Instructional & Media Services at Dickinson College

Dubbed "The Great Flu", the game is based on the threat that the emergence of a new flu virus and its rapid spread across the globe would pose to humanity. "The game is based on the need to increase public awareness to the threat posed by a pandemic and the measures in place to contain it," said Albert Osterhaus, head of virology at the Erasmus Medical Centre and one of the experts involved in creating the game.

The idea is that we  should challenge thinking, inspire creativity, and stir up discussion with a Powerpoint presentation – not present a series of dry facts. 

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web.

Twitter’s audience is now 55 percent international.

the idea that separating more personal services like Facebook from business-oriented services like LinkedIn makes little sense in the Internet age.

All you have to do is enter your LinkedIn login information

“The revolution is that, all of a sudden, the Internet can be a network of intelligent agents, doing work for their users, rather than a place where big commercial interests aim to gather as many users on their platform as possible,”

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag.

When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called History Engine to help students around the country work together on a shared tool to make sense of history documents online. Students generate brief essays on American history, and the History Engine aggregates the essays and makes them navigable by tags. Call it Wikipedia for students. Except better. First of all, its content is moderated by professors. Second, while Wikipedia still presents information two-dimensionally, History Engine employs mapping technology to organize scholarship by time period, geographic location, and themes.

“The challenge of a digital age is that that writing assignment hasn’t changed since the age of the typewriter,” Mr. Torget said. “The digital medium requires us to rethink how we make those assignments.”