Because I do not expect anyone to pay one hundred and eighty of their hard-earned dollars for an academic book, I thought that you might want to let your school's librarian know about this great new book called Design and Implementation of Educational Games, which I co-edited with Diane Wilcox and which is to be released at the end of March or in early April by IGI-Global. if you don't like to read traditional books anymore, an electronic version is also available.

This is a reminder that proposals for the special issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication are due December 31. Please see the full cfp below. Please write to the editors if you have questions.

Pavel.

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EEE Transactions on Professional Communication
Special Issue Focus: Professional Communication In Global Contexts

Deadline for Proposals: December 31, 2009

Guest Editors: Pavel Zemliansky, James Madison University, USA;

Constance Kampf, University of Aarhus, Denmark

Overview

Read/Write/Web reports on Rheingold's new project--the "Social Classroom." According to the story, it is "an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom."

So, is this anything more that a Drupal distribution designed for learning and teaching? I think a lot of us who use Drupal-based sites already do that stuff. Perhaps I am missing something.

Design and Implementation of Educational Games: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives

Call for Chapters

a book edited by: Pavel Zemliansky, Ph.D and Diane Wilcox, Ph.D
both James Madison University)
Proposal Due Date: December 15, 2008
To be Published by IGI Global
http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=524

Introduction to the Subject Area

According to CNET, starting October 1, Comcast is capping your monthly usage to 250Gb a month. If anyone hears about a class action lawsuit against this, please let me know. I will gladly sign up.Not only do I have to pay $50 a month for mediocre service, but now they are going to tell me what "acceptable" uses of the web exist.

To all kairosnews-ers:

I'd like to offer an open content research-writing text that I have been putting online over the past few weeks. See if you have any use for any of it in your classes. It is a work in progress, and I am still working on the formatting of the chapters. If you like something that is not formatted the way you'd like, help yourself to it and modify the text as you wish.

The text is available at www.pz-writing.net/methods.

At the risk of being accused of shameless self-promotion, I thought I'd plug in my most recent co-edited (with Kirk St.Amant, of ECU) collection, The Handbook of Research on Virtual Workplaces and the New Nature of Business Practices.

Matt, I will admit that my cover and ever topic are not as cool as yours, but you have an essay on new media in this one, so you are partly responsible for it.

Hello, kairosnewsers:

I am working on a research project which involves learning about methods of assessing the effectiveness of e-learning tools, particularly socially-collaborative and "informal" learning tools. I am thinking community blogs, wikis, virtual worlds and such as well as platforms that combine all of the above and perhaps others. In other words, I am not interested in the type of electronic behemoths which are focusing on grammar drills and which are put out by all the textbook publishers. Here are some questions that I'd need to answer:

--design effectiveness

Has anyone else seen this?

http://www.eofficehours.com/

Looks like more competition for our friends at Blackboard. I ca see this taking off particularly at high school and, perhaps, in some smaller colleges which do not choose to dish out the thousands it takes to run Bb.

This came via CNET, perhaps some you have read this already: Google has launched Google for Educators. These tools are, of course, not new, they are just all in one place now.

In my view, this contains lots of useful features, one of them being able to collaborate on texts in docs and spreadsheets without having to set up a wiki. I'd even be willing to overlook a couple of side-bar ads here and there.