The University of Western Ontario earned top marks among large universities in The Globe and Mail’s annual report card of Canadian higher learning, and some professors say the university’s experiments with clickers may have helped its score. A number of courses at Western Ontario employ the devices, which let  professors pose multiple-choice questions in class and have students’ answers appear immediately onscreen. (The Globe and Mail)

Public-health workers and emergency responders will be able to hone their disaster response skills using video games being developed by a team at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The games will simulate biological, chemical, radiological, and natural disasters in a major metropolitan area. The intent is to allow the workers to practice their skills without having to set up expensive and elaborate drills.

In a conference presentation on Tuesday billed as a verbal shootout, a well-known computer-game designer faced off against a leading instructional designer over how much of an educator’s input is needed to make an effective instructional game. The session was part of the Serious Games Summit, a two-day event near Washington, D.C., that brought together video-game professionals, military officials, and educators.

The game designer was Marc Prensky, a consultant and the author of Digital Game-Based Learning (Paragon House, 2004). He argued that instructional designers often do more harm then good when they work on educational games. "Whenever you add an instructional designer to a team, they suck the fun out," he said. And he argued that if players of educational games don’t enjoy the experience, they won’t be engaged in the activity, and therefore will not learn much. "We want to get ...

In the early 1990s, an online bulletin board created by students at the University of Iowa was among the Internet’s hottest spots: More than 60,000 users would check in to discuss politics, technology, and whatever else was on their minds. But in an era of chat rooms and list servers, there’s not much room for a communications tool that most Web users consider obsolete. Membership has dwindled to about 3,000 users, but Iowa’s bulletin board soldiers on—as a reminder of a bygone age of the Internet, if nothing else. (The Iowa Daily)

Students whose college careers were interrupted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are flocking to Web-based courses—especially free ones. Sloan Semester, a roster of eight-week online courses offered at no charge by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has enrolled more than 1,700 students displaced by the hurricanes for a lineup of some 1,300 different courses.

A pilot program that lets college students buy digital textbooks from their campus bookstores has gotten off to a slow start. But the company that runs the project says the early returns show at the very least that students are interested in e-books.

MBS Textbook Exchange, Inc., has released sales data from 10 colleges that started offering digital textbooks through the company’s Web site this fall. According to the company, e-books now account for 5.7% of the textbook sales at those institutions.

For more details on the digital-textbook project, see an article from The Chronicle by Andrea Foster.

Employees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seem to be making use of a fledgling program that makes laptop computers available for loan. The project started earlier this year, when the university’s chancellor used money from a bonus he received to buy 10 machines so that campus employees without computers could borrow them for home use. Since then the program has been expanded twice, and the university now keeps 30 loanable laptops on hand—most of which are usually in use. (The Herald-Sun)

The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to intervene in a legal dispute between the University of California system and Microsoft. Microsoft had petitioned the court to explain how patent law affects software code on the hard drives of computers that are assembled by foreign companies. The issue is one small aspect of a larger tussle between the two parties about who invented a Web-browser technology that launches and displays applications like software plug-ins and Java applets from Web browsers.

That case is awaiting another trial in the U.S. District Court in Chicago, which in 2003 ruled that Microsoft was infringing on the university’s patent and ordered the company to pay the university $521-million. The judgment was later suspended by a federal appeals court. For more on the case, see an article in The Chronicle by Andrea Foster.

Life without a laptop isn’t easy when you’re an undergraduate at Columbia University. But according to the Columbia Daily Spectator, between 10 percent and 20 percent of students at the institution don’t own computers—and for some students, the newspaper suggests, that may be a matter of personal choice, not economics. Even in the age of the laptop, it seems, the public computer lab is far from dead. (Columbia Daily Spectator)

The University of Tennessee has told about 1,900 students and employees that their names and security numbers were posted online in an archive of an e-mail discussion group for campus employees. Members of the university’s bursar’s office and its computing office used the discussion group to exchange information about students who had paid too much or too little in tuition fees. But they apparently made the back-and-forth public instead of protecting it behind a firewall. (The Tennessean)