The recent Games for Change Conference was covered on NPR, featuring interviews with the developers of games such as Darfur is Dying and Peacemaker. The premise of these games is that to reach the Net Generation with socially progressive ideas, you need to engage them with their favorite interactive media. Since one of the familiar objectives in many of our campus' strategic plans is to develop the next generation of leaders, and to ensure that our graduates participate effectively in the political process, these new models of developing thoughtful and yet engaging game environments to teach progressive values seem worth paying attention to, both for the lessons they teach, and more generally as models of platforms for thinking about future educational environments. 

After a long build-up, Google has finally released OpenSocial. Unfortunately, it seems that the name is a bit misleading. Many people, myself included, had assumed OpenSocial would provide a way of communicating between the various social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

These social networking sites have always been exceptions to the general rule of openness in web 2.0 sites. You cannot, for example, create an rss feed that shows all of your friends in Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace along with their recent updates. However, it would be quite easy to compile this same feed using accounts of your friends on LiveJournal and Blogger.

Folded neatly into Google Docs, Google is at long last fielding its very own web-based presentation application, the other major contenders I am aware of being Zoho and ThinkFree. (I omit SlideShare because it does not provide editing functions.) The PowerPoint .ppt file I imported to Google looked very nice--allowing for the customary

It's rare as an educational technologist that you find a cutting edge technology whose use is immediately obvious to faculty.  Google Sky is the exception. Astronomers will need little convincing after seeing the latest version of Google Earth in action.

 http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html