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LLT is an international journal (published exclusiveley on the web) with an editorial board of international scholars in the fields of second language acquisition and computer-assisted language learning. LLT publishes articles that report on original research or present an original framework that links second language acquisition theory, previous research, and language learning, teaching, and testing practices that utilize technology. It aims at reaching a broad audience in a timely manner, providing a multimedia format which can more fully illustrate the technologies under discussion, as well as providing hypermedia links to related background information. It is published three times per year and it was ranked in the top 20 Education Journals. Important: Besides the very interesting articles, it also contains a section of general guidelines for both quantitative and qualitative research!

Current methods for controlling one's avatar in a virtual environment interacting with intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) are unnatural, typically requiring a complex set of keyboard commands for controlling your avatar, and dialog menus for interacting with IVAs. Recent advances in markerless body and motion tracking, speech and gesture recognition technologies, coupled with intelligent agent/behavior modeling and speech synthesis technologies, now make it possible to naturally control one's avatar through the movement of one's body and to interact with IVAs through speech and gesture. These capabilities are now just beginning to emerge in the arena of computer gaming, and offer great promise for military training. In this paper we describe our recent work integrating motion capture, gesture recognition, speech recognition, natural language understanding, and intelligent agent/behavior modeling technologies to produce more natural mechanisms for avatar control as well as IVAs that are able to understand relatively unconstrained speech and recognize human movement and gesture. We illustrate these capabilities within the domain of roadside security checkpoint training, where trainees are able to gesture (e.g., wave forward, stop, point to a location) and speak to IVAs (drivers and passengers) in the scene.

This shall be one of our main inspiration within the framework of our experiment for LEARNING WITH MEDIA, during which we performed a session of "Start the Party" for "Playstation Move" on the Playstation 3, in comparison to our previous experiment with "Wii Sports"…

The internet in this case has assumed the role of a very effective uncensored news agency from which every broadcaster and news corporation have been able to freely source newsfeeds, raw from the scene.

Interesting! This makes me wonder if government-controlled media is an idea that will disappear in the coming years as social media grows. It might just become archaic and completely incompatible with the world situation. I feel like governments can only have so much power in this and as the world becomes even more connected, perhaps other countries will have similar revolutions. Iran? China?...even North Korea? (I think that one might take a long while though. They are pretty isolated).