This work explores the use of multimodal communication in a community of expert "World of Warcraft"® players and its impact on politeness, identity, and relationships. Players in the community regularly communicated using three linguistic modes quasi-simultaneously: text chat, voice chat, and face-to-face interaction. Using the…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), with the generous support of Dell and Intel, have jointly released the "Technology Outlook for Community, Technical, and Junior Colleges 2013-2018: An NMC Horizon Project Sector Analysis." This report applies the process developed…

In today's economy, productivity and efficiency require collaboration between employees. In order to improve collaboration the factors affecting teamwork must be examined to identify where changes can be made in order to increase performance. One factor contributing to teamwork is team cohesion and represents a process whereby members are joined…

Children with autism have severe and pervasive impairments in social interactions and communication that impact most areas of daily living and often limit independent engagement in leisure activities. We taught four children with autism to engage in an age-appropriate leisure skill, playing the video game Guitar Hero II[TM], through the use of (a)…

Videogames represent one of the fastest growing and most influential forms of contemporary visual culture. In this article, the author looks to five aspects of current videogames: perspective, interactivity, interface, narrative, and time and movement. Each of these videogame modalities is analyzed as related to a wide range of popular media,…

Over the last decade blog (a contraction of "web log") has crept into the national lexicon and culture, transforming the way people communicate. Although exact numbers are difficult to gather, the Web site "Technorati" is tracking more than 112.8 million blogs. Rarely far removed from technology; cell phones, iPods, Facebook…

In this article we describe a semester-long project, based on the popular video game series Guitar Hero, designed to introduce upper-level undergraduate statistics students to statistical research. Some of the goals of this project are to help students develop statistical thinking that allows them to approach and answer open-ended research…

Background: To improve understanding of the mechanisms affecting the relationship between adolescent obesity and poor academic performance, we examined the association of overweight or perceived weight status with academic achievement. Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study of 14-17-year-olds (N = 11,012) from the nationally representative…

Over the past 18 years, a number of large scale reviews of the literature have documented that gender differences in computer attitudes, ability, and use tend to favor males. Since the use of laptops in higher education classrooms is increasing, it is important to examine whether this use is disproportionally advantageous to males and…

In his March 2011 AAHE Scholar presentation, the author suggested several possible innovations in school health education that, if initiated, may better meet the needs and interests of two youngest generations--Millenials and 2020s. In this article, the author assesses the status of health education in schools, enumerates the characteristics of…

The author reports on how U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' opinions in youths'-rights cases reflect his "originalist" thinking. Justice Thomas, 63, marks two decades on the court Oct. 23, and a hallmark of his tenure is his willingness to carve out a solitary stance on certain issues. Particularly in cases involving schools…

The progress registered in the use of video games as educational tools has not yet been successfully transferred to the classroom. In an attempt to close this gap, a framework was developed that assists in the design and classroom integration of educational games. The framework addresses both the educational dimension and the ludic dimension. The…

The American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE) was founded in 1982 as the result of a merger between the National Association for Public and Continuing Adult Education (NAPCAE) and the Adult Education Association (AEA). This prestigious association is dedicated to the belief that lifelong learning contributes to human…

Introduction: Video games have proven to be a valuable resource to work different school subjects and topics. Beyond specific content, they could help to develop different abilities, like problem solving. However, not much has been studied on this topic, or many of the studies followed a perspective not entirely compatible with an educational…