Video games in class rooms, text messaging and scholarly articles.

The article Changing The Game: What Happens When Video Games Enter the Classroom? talks about integrating video games with classroom learning and also discusses the possible effects of doing so.
The article mentions that students may be motivated by such a method of learning as many find the conventional way of learning, that is, classroom lectures rather boring. But at the same time some may not find video games very appealing. The article mentions that a quarter of a class withdrew from the course as they preferred learning in reading groups etc.
The author talks about how the integration of a video game, Civilization 3 with classroom learning had positive as well as negative effects. While some students found this new way of learning about the history of the world interesting, others found it complicated, and rather frustrating. The article mentions how failure is an essential role in learning, for example when some students failed a game, they tried to win the next time by learning more about other civilizations, what kind of natural resources they had etc.
However, in conclusion the author says that using video games may make classroom learning fun, and interesting but will not help in getting in to college, which requires scoring well on standardized tests and academically.

Text messaging.
All the articles on text messaging were interesting. It was surprising to know that people in the US started using text messaging much later, as they were already using e-mails. One of the article talks about abbreviations that have been used in text messaging. I agree with the article that the language used in text messaging, has not caused any change in language, people still use correct language otherwise, and can still spell words correctly. The use of abbreviations and acronyms in text messaging is nothing new.One of the interesting aspects of the articles was that how people preferred text messaging to face to face conversations. I belive that text messaging can have better impact as a conversation thn face to face intercation.

Scholarly articles are very useful and important as they provide us with a lot of information,and also the author provides his insights on both sides of an argument, which does not have any impact on the readers thoughts and he or she has the freedom to form his own opinions on a particular subject.