The Cliff notes: “Last year, nine video games were sold every second. The global market for game-related products generates over $40 billion in annual revenues and is expected to eclipse $68 billion by 2012.

“Children as young as four are immersed in a new gaming culture, but many parents, educators and health professionals, concerned over violence, sexual content, and reports of addiction, do not consider games to be a positive force in children’s lives. Game Changer addressed this critique, offering a new framework to use games to help children learn healthy behaviors, traditional skills [...] and 21st-century strengths such as critical thinking, global learning, and programming design.”

Game Changer White Paper
Download pdf

Game Changer Presentation
Download ppt

Britian’s Sky News quotes Schwarzenegger as saying that “Today, our kids get their information from the internet, downloaded onto their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their cell phones. So why are California’s public school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?” [More... ]

Switching to e-textbooks and open-sourced content make a lot of sense in principal — indeed, an approach that we used at Pearson Education to win a California adoption in social studies — but can it work across the curriculum areas and across the state? Some feel The Aaahnold’s initiative will face barriers, possibly insurmountable ones. Writing in ArsTechnica, Ryan Paul observes:

“The effort seems very promising, but the state’s complex standards and arduous textbook evaluation process will pose major challenges.[...]

There is already plenty of textbook-ready material available on the Internet in the public domain or under open licenses, but the real challenge is compiling and editing it so that it will meet the state’s exacting standards. California is known for having the most demanding textbook evaluation practices in the country, with publishers forced to go to extreme lengths to meet state requirements. The arduous review process is forcing some publishing companies to stop selling books in the state and is also a factor that has contributed significantly to the rising cost of K-12 textbooks in California.

Among the state’s most controversial policies are those which require books to reflect society’s diversity by including representative references to individuals of minority ethnicities. Critics say that these requirements are overly burdensome and have made political correctness a higher priority than quality in the textbook production and review process. The situation has raised some bizarre challenges for publishers. For example, some textbook publishing companies controversially enlist able-bodied children to pose in wheelchairs so that they have a sufficient number of pictures of “disabled” students to appease state textbook reviewers.

Now that the state is taking up the task of compiling textbook material itself, it will be forced to contend with its own labyrinthine mess of ambiguous and conflicting requirements. It’s not a problem that one can simply crowd-source. The open textbook development process will likely be closely scrutinized by critics and advocates on both sides of California’s divisive textbook standards debate.” [More...]

Personally I think Schwarzenegger’s efforts are long overdue and that in spite of the high hurdles — indeed, maybe beause of them — he’s the right person in the right place to make this happen. Your thoughts?

…as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn’t be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we’ve jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.

And IMHO that is fascinating.

As the annual techno-temple of E3 winds down, reports are starting to filter in about what’s going to be hot in the next year. Personally I’m going to wait for our friend Warren Buckleitner to weigh in.  If you’re not so patient and have to be the first on your block, however, look no further than Wired.com’s Geek Dad for the 10 things you and your kids will want from E3 this year.

Working together, Microsoft and N-trig have created a type of software interface that lets other companies add touch functions to their programs. Such touch software can handle lots of fingers hitting a screen at once rather than just relying on one or two digits, as most of today’s touch screens do.

Read the whole story here: PC Touch-Screen Technology Moving Beyond Curiosity - NYTimes.com.

“The lifetime wishes are not the only desires of your Sim. Each day, your Sim barrages you with smaller wishes like wanting a promotion at work or acquire a new recipe. [...] Choosing wishes gives you a constant stream of mini-goals that keeps the game moving forward [...] there are almost 75 wishes in the game. [...] Finishing all of these wishes will likely take you between 12 and 14 hours.”

Complete review here >>>

Anyone can now go to Metaplace.com and register. You get a small world for free, with full access to all the content creation tools. Lately, I’ve been describing it at “the power of Second Life, with the ease of The Sims, on the web.”

It’s early days yet, of course. There is a lot more left to do. For example, we have not yet released the ability to embed worlds on websites and profile pages, which is a huge part of the story. There’s more to come in terms of web integration, plugins on the marketplace so that it gets easier and easier to make what you want, and so on. We’re not done by a long shot.

But it’s still exciting. As users create more content and share more, the power everyone has to create will rise dramatically — we’re making the classic bet on users and the network effect that has helped so many websites. I can’t wait to see what develops.