In today's Chronicle, Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Sim City, argues video games are better at motivating students to learn than actually teaching them, and that play is an integral part of that process.

Move over Guitar Hero.   This is a story of the reconstruction of a small piece of social and musical history in Oakland, California on NPR of all places.  It's a great idea, but hopefully the virtual reality is smoother than the clip included here.  Just imagine something like this merged with XBox; now that would be something really fun.

Ben Vershbow , a fellow at the Institute for the Future of the Book, is interviewed in this month's Library Journal in an article entitled "The Social Life of Books". In the interview, Vershbow does a nice job of highlighting many of the Institute's concerns and activities. Their work focuses on, as one might guess, the possible futures of the book. They divide their time between dissecting various experiments in electronic books, writing soon-to-be-released software for creating networked texts, devising grand new schemes for new types of publications, and in thoughtful worry over how corporations like Amazon and Google are taking the field in the wrong direction. Of particular interest to educators is the next/text project, which is exploring what networked textbooks might become.

The ACM online journal Ubiquity features an interview with futurist/genius/inventor Ray Kurzweil in the January 10-17, 2006, issue. The interview focuses on his new book The Singularity is Near, which includes statements like "We'll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We'll have it in a supercomputer by 2010." Pulled out of context, such statements seem, well, hyperbolic, but the interview touches on some points crucial for teaching and learning. Consider, for example, this exchange about pattern recognition and think about how it might connect to the discussion about experts and novices in works such as Brandsford et al's How People Learn:

Clark Aldrich, described by Fortune magazine as one of the top three e-learning gurus, discusses the gaming future of education, proposing that while teachers can suggest some promising paths for the use of games and simulations, for this promise to be delivered, we must invest on a massive scale in creating new software that challenges older learning paradigms and older formats. Includes lots of provocative quotes and makes the claim that "... schools and corporations are, basically, enemies of each other today. Schools have an impossible task. They teach stuff that, for the most part, enterprises don't value, other than the most basic competencies."