Fiercely educational, harmless fun or the Digital Menace, computer gaming is likely all of these things, each for it's own reasons as much as we all know there are some teachers who are worth their weight in tenure gold and others a veritable pox that could extinguish the inquisitive spark in just about anyone; what we do know is there's something about the top video games that is escaping educators, both in their competition for the minds and imaginations of students, and in their own craft of carving digital experiences that can draw them in, and it's to that end the latest wwwtools newsletter has assembled a long and thoughtful list of debate, debunk and best-practices on Gaming in the Classroom:

on the one hand, some educators will point out that apart from their undeniable power to motivate, games are capable of fostering the development of valuable skills in areas such as strategic thinking, communication and collaboration, group decision-making and negotiation, literacy and numeracy; on the other hand, others (perhaps less willing to accept the role of fun in education) see games as wasting valuable time, irrelevant to set curricula, and incapable of helping students to achieve mandated high-stakes outcomes.
[ wwwtools for teachers ]

As with so much in education, I'm not of the mind to say the games are good or bad unless we're willing to admit and confess that the entire opus of educational games committed to classrooms thus far are vacuous loads of thoughtless crap, which is maybe going a little too far (since I couldn't have possibly previewed them all) but you get my drift.  read more »

In his ripper lit-review of the new Doctor Who, author James Bow makes a confession that's really more than just a Who fan's musing; his remark is prescient of the End of the World. The end of the TiVO world, anyway ...

Do you know, with Rogers Digital Cable, one can watch Doctor Who five times tonight? ... I wonder how many sad fans watched the program five times in a row, if only to bulk up the national ratings. Heh.

I watched it twice.
[ Yup. Doctor Who is Back ]

Five times in a row? Five times in a row is nothing, or to paraphrase other brit-pop, I laugh at your five times in a row!.

Take Episode One (Rose): I watched it. Only at my leisure. Next day my youngest kids and I watched it together (I like to preview so I can brace them for the scarier bits), a week later the older boys watched it while I was likely previewing The End of the World. Each to our own time. Each by our demand.

All because of the kindness of strangers ...  read more »

You round the corner, up the ramp, through the thoughtfully automated glass door, and there, between you and the ATM and your money, is a one meter high brick divider wall. After all, everyone can step over a waist-high barrier! Can't they?

In order to access all the functions of Online Banking, you need to modify your browser settings to enable cookies and JavaScript.

To find out how to do this, select the "Security" link at the bottom of this page. {Result #C101}
CIBC Online Banking (as seen by a text-browser)

Presumably the instructions under the security link explain how to correct a multitude of physical (and economic) disabilities allowing everyone to enjoy the joys of modern visual browsers.  read more »

The best ever reason why it's not enough to get your social assistance sister-in-law to bang out a quick website and then fuggiddaboudit, here's a new litigal flavour we will no doubt encounter more and more as the web slips into the mainstream: A New Zealand restauranteur has been fined $3000NZD plus costs ... for failing to update his website.

It seems, and albeit convenient enough to be a little dodgy, that Tony's Vineyard had let the website slip his mind long enough for prices to creep anywhere from 17% to 36% higher than the web-vertised, and indeed some species of delicasies had long since gone extinct. Patrons were not amused, neither was the judge; Tony found himself in court and in contradiction of the New Zealand Fair Trading Act. His pleas of lack of time and, quote, lack of expertise, unquote, were similarly unamusing.

“If a business chooses to promote and advertise its services on the internet, it should be aware of the need to maintain the accuracy or truth of those representations ... The misleading impression generated by website representations is very important because it is a gateway to encouraging customers ...”
-- Commission Chair Paula Rebstock

Like, y'know, I maybe haven't a clue about broadcast video production or how to set a linotype machine, but doesn't it behoove me to verify and answer to the contents of my trad-media advertising? Thought so.  read more »

While the journalists may scream foul, we should remember that they regularly get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, which is not to denegrate journalists who fall from The Code, but just to say that no one group has any monopoly on ethics.

Just how far can marketers go in soliciting blog coverage of their products or services? Does the practice of paying bloggers to blog about a product amount to an advertorial, embedded infomercial or product placement -- and does such an arrangement violate the compact of trust between reader and writer? Or is it simply the next logical step in the blogosphere's evolution from hobby to business opportunity?
[ via Influence peddling in the blogosphere ]

We've already noted instances of info-mercials posing as news and political non-disclosures, in fact, it even happens in academia so it wasn't such a jump for me to have pondered the possibilities blogger payola scandals as a natural growing pain given a media with a critical audience mass.  read more »

Is it just me, or does anyone else see a similarity between link-spammers, who say our websites are open and therefore ergo to wit fair game for their profiteering, and those who, with no actual business or stake in the game, set themselves as automated pundit aggregators of a topic where they add no actual value, but effortlessly cash in on topical quirks of the AdSense? It's yet another new question in the breakdown of the web, what it really means to have google juice ...

... Right now asbestos reform and asbestos related litigation is on fire. Lawyers are paying anywhere from $15-100 per click through on Google ads. The second part of this big experiment is to see if I can capture some of that click through revenue while still providing a somewhat valid service to people who might arrive by search results.
[ via Michael Buffington ]

And he just so happened to choose 'asbestos' as his new hobby topic? Ok ...  read more »

You can feel their pain; they are just trying to do something nice for the bittorrent community, and all they get are hurdles; that's prompted Will and friends to formulate a short Monkey Method Manifesto of how you and I can help make the world of file trading a better place for everyone.  read more »

It's a good and sensible list, religiously followed by some and who knows what really goes through the minds of those who ignore these points of ettiquette for playing nice with your peer-to-peer trading:

1. Make torrents accessible and not hidden in forums or login pages -- require a signup to get the content or especially to comment on it, but please, let the bots find it in the first place.
2. Related to that, Make it easy to get descriptive information and be descriptive with your filenames. Nobody uses DOS 3.1 anymore. Go ahead, use spaces, mixed case, spell it out. If your video is DivX and in Italian, say so. And please be sure your data is correct; if you're not sure if it's Sonic Youth in Toronto or Seattle, leave it out ... or ask someone who knows. Bad data is a culture-jammer.
3. Consolidate torrent links, collect them by whatever similarities you choose, but be easy on the webcrawlers and not make them dig, and make it easy for all visitors to understand when two files are the same.

Sure, I have some great memories of Alberta, it's the place where I first flew solo, where Chester broke all records for a two-seater sailplane, it's where I overcame my fear of roller-coasters and tandem-bikes down steep winding mountain highways with no way off the road but up or down.

But it's also the land where my guitar was denied access to a roadside truck stop, and where, on realizing they didn't really want me there either, I went back outside to find it kicked in. Mind you, the Calgary repair shop was friendly enough, but they also didn't seem the least bit surprised.

Ok, not to jump to conclusions because any reasonable person knows full well no geographic region has any monopoly on idiots, but it is really curious, really curious how, in the map of spam-sources world-wide, southern Albert is a fat red blob.