The AbleGamers Foundation, an organization focused on providing disabled peoples with information and technology that allows them to more easily enjoy video games, has awarded Star Wars: The Old Republic its 2011 Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year Award for launching with "colorblind friendly options, full subtitles, and control options to let those with mobility impairments play the game as easy as possible."

Think of it as higher education meets Moneyball.

Today, half of students quit college before earning a credential. Proponents feel that making better use of data to inform decisions, known as "analytics," can help solve that problem while also improving teaching.

In April, Austin Peay debuted software that recommends courses based on a student's major, academic record, and how similar students fared in that class.

Bastion is an action role-playing experience that redefines storytelling in games, with a reactive narrator who marks your every move. Explore more than 40 lush hand-painted environments as you discover the secrets of the Calamity, a surreal catastrophe that shattered the world to pieces. Wield a huge arsenal of upgradeable weapons and battle savage beasts adapted to their new habitat. Finish the main story to unlock New Game Plus mode and continue your journey! Also included is the all-new 'No-Sweat Mode', offering unlimited chances to continue.

Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at,"

"This was really kind of a last-ditch effort," he recalled. "Can the Foldit players really solve it?"They could. "They actually did it in less than 10 days,"

At 7.5 million users, Weebly doesn't have the size or visibility of platforms like Tumblr (more than 25 million blogs) or WordPress (about 54 million). But Weebly, which tries to make it cheap and easy for businesses to create their own websites, now powers 2 percent of the Internet, according to research firm Netcraft.

They did it using a "freemium" model, giving away most services at no cost but charging for additional features.

Veltri, the chief operating officer, says that 51 percent of businesses still don't have a Web presence.

If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.

The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about—a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.

Exploitationware captures gamifiers' real intentions: a grifter's game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along.

Gamification seems to me to take the least interesting thing about games and try to shoehorn it into other areas of life. Points and upgrades... bleah, I get enough of that from my frequent flyer program. Where's the imaginary world? Where are the characters to care about, the story to follow? Where are the viscerally meaningful consequences of my decisions? WHERE'S MY GODDAMNED MAGIC SWORD?

Call it penance. Detox. I stop gazing at screens. Five days with no tweets. No Zelda. No email. No RSS. I jettison the barriers - the screens, the earbuds, the chatter. I disconnect to reconnect with the non-virtual world I inhabit. Recalibrate. Reevaluate "productive." Embrace silence. Ride my bike. Build towers for the joy of knocking them down. Pay attention.

The search process was undertaken on 5 January 2009. Using the “advanced search” feature available on ISI Web of Science, SSCI and AHCI were searched using the keywords blog*, weblog* and web log* (trunctuated so as to find different usage of the basic word, such as blogs, bloggers, blogging, etc.). This indentified papers that focus on blogs but also those that examine blogs in relation with other media. As for temporal limits, all articles published before 1 January 2009, were considered for inclusion. In total, 311 articles were identified.

in many classrooms on today's traditional campuses, with class sizes in the hundreds of students, distance learning begins in the fifth row.

in many classrooms on today's traditional campuses, with class sizes in the hundreds of students, distance learning begins in the fifth row. At the same time, students spend much of their days holed up in their dorm rooms chatting with one another on Facebook. The opportunities to learn from other students and professors, in and out of class, are declining at the very time that we know such engagement is critical for learning.

We know students learn more when expectations are high and when feedback on what they need to do to improve is constant. I'm certain that my young friend, and his friends, would work harder if we expected it of them—but we don't.

"The interesting thing about Portal 2 is it doesn't sort of fit the traditional simplistic model of what a game is. It's not a collection of weapons. It's not a collection of monsters. It's really about science. It's about spatial reasoning, it's about learning physics, it's about problem solving.

"There seems to be this distinction between games that are educational, and games that are going to be commercially successful. I'm not really sure I buy into that."

A lot of times [the label] 'educational games' is a way of being an excuse for bad game design or poor production values."

turning the game into a more direct learning experience, with custom tools to match educational programs. "We just add another layer on top of the authoring tools to simplify the production of those spaces," Valve head Gabe Newell explained to us this afternoon.

the level creation tool for the PC version of Portal 2 gets another layer of interaction on top of the placement of, say, platforms or boxes. "If you give us a lesson plan, we can give you a tool that allows kids to build content to lock down those lessons,"

"The layering on top of it of the framework for giving people a direct physical experience of physics is there, but you have to tell me exactly how you want to measure whether or not your students are successful or not."

Colleges themselves are also finding a need to craft multiple identities online, setting up a different Facebook page and Twitter account for every department or research lab. The University of Virginia's library has 14 Facebook accounts.

Watch Out for Zombies The job of updating a Facebook page or Twitter account for a university department is often assigned to a student worker. When the academic year ends and that student has graduated or moved on to another job, though, those pages may stand lifeless, creating a kind of zombie online presence. "If it's not active, it's detrimental," says Erin Dougherty, who recently became Endicott College's first digital-marketing coordinator. "It just sort of turns people off if you're a visitor to go to something that hasn't been updated in a long time." Ms. Dougherty is hunting for zombie accounts on the campus and either recommending they be spiked or finding a permanent point person or group to make sure each one has a pulse.

"This is a course about what it means to be human, focused on some of the enduring questions our existence inevitably raises for us. The goals of this course reflect this focus."You roll your eyes, figuring the next four (or five (or six)) years were supposed to be about shaping your own destiny, learning how to drink alcohol without throwing up and playing a bunch of games until some ungodly hour in the morning. Grudgingly, you look at the reading list. Gilgamesh, Aristotle, Goffman, Donne, Portal....Portal. No, you haven't misread. But understandably, you look closer.Week 4February 7: Montaigne, Essays, selectedFebruary 9: Goffman, Presentation of Self, Introduction and Ch. 1February 11: Portal (video game developed by Valve Software)

"She's got her forestage and she's got her backstage, the stuff she doesn't want you to see," he said. "The game does an amazing job of slowly peeling back her veneer, and the stuff she doesn't want you to see or know is so slowly revealed. Those students started to exchange stories about what they saw behind the scenes or writing on the walls, little stuff they would find, little artifacts. That really provoked a lot of interesting connections between the Goffman text and GLaDOS as a character, as a personality, and the way that the environment is an extension of her and her personality. That really clicked."

Ready for the ultimate kicker? We still haven’t learned! We got thirsty again, and are drinking the same ten-year-old Kool-Aid without so much as asking for ice. Rather than embracing this new technology and merging it with what we’ve learned already, we’re throwing off our clothes and running naked in the rain, waving our hands in the air, sure that this time it’ll be different, because this time it’s better! “It’s not about building a website anymore! It’s so much cooler! It’s about Facebook, and fans, and followers, and engagement, and influence, and…”Will you please shut up before you make me vomit on your shoes?

Central to it all is a simple theory – that games are fun because they teach us interesting things and they do it in a way that our brains prefer – through systems and puzzles

"An effective learning environment, and for that matter an effective creative environment, is one in which failure is OK – it's even welcomed,"