What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Communications of the ACM (CACM for short, not the best sounding acronym around) is the ACM’s flagship magazine. Started in 1957, CACM is handy for keeping up to date on current research being carried out across all topics of computer science and realworld applications. CACM has had an illustrious past with many influential pieces of work and debates started within its pages. These include Hoare’s presentation of the Quicksort algorithm; Rivest, Shamir and Adleman’s description of the first publickey cryptosystem RSA; and Dijkstra’s famous letter against the use of GOTO. In addition to the print edition, which is released monthly, there is a fantastic website (http://cacm.acm. org/) that showcases not only the most recent edition but all previous CACM articles as well, readable online as well as downloadable as a PDF. In addition, the website lets you browse for articles by subject, a handy feature if you want to focus on a particular topic. CACM is really essential reading. Pretty much guaranteed to contain content that is interesting to anyone, it keeps tabs on the latest in computer science. It is a valuable asset for us students, who tend to delve deep into a particular area of CS and forget everything that is happening around us. — Daniel Gooch U ndergraduate research is like a box of chocolates: You never know what kind of project you will get. That being said, there are still a few things you should know to get the most out of the experience.

Communications of the ACM

El artículo tiene como objetivo evaluar el nivel de desarrollo de la capacidad de absorción realizada (RACAP) en las Pyme colombianas. Se parte de una muestra de 363 Pyme colombianas (Dane,2012), se usa una revisión de literatura con apoyo del análisis de contenido y un modelo de regresión lineal, que permiten mostrar la existencia de una correlación lineal positiva entre la adquisición y asimilación del conocimiento externo en las organizaciones objeto de estudio,. Palabras clave: Capacidades de absorción, capacidades de absorción potencial, medición de las capacidades de absorción ABSTRACT:

Measurement of potential absorption capacity in Colombia's innovative companies [Medición de la capacidad de absorción potencial en las empresas innovadoras de Colombia]

The notion of firm boundaries has received considerable attention in theories of the firm that address the problems of investment incentives and mitigation of hold-up problems. In this paper we attempt to develop a different approach to the problem of vertical firm boundaries, based on recent advances in the capabilities view of the firm. Our arguments rely on the pioneering insights of Penrose, Richardson and Loasby to elaborate a view of the boundaries determined by the interaction of the firm's direct and indirect capabilities with other actors. We develop the notion of indirect capabilities to highlight how firm boundaries respond to the distribution of capabilities in the economy as well as the modes of access to complementary and external capabilities. We conclude that the evolution of firm boundaries must be understood in the context of decisions on how the firm relates to other actors in its environment.

The Multiple Boundaries of the Firm

[ACM Press the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference - Tampere, Finland (2011.09.28-2011.09.30)] Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference on Envisioning Future Media Environments - MindTrek \'11 - From game design elements to gamefulness

This chapter describes how multimodal serious games can create an immersive experience to enhance the visitor’s experience. The creation of more engaging digital heritage exhibitions by seamlessly integrating technologies to provide a multimodal virtual and augmented reality experience is presented. In engaging exhibitions, participants can switch between different modes of exploring the physical artefacts at the museum and can explore these artefacts further through serious games, user interfaces, virtual reality and augmented reality. Different types of interaction paradigms are also illustrated. Moreover, a framework for multimodal cultural heritage is proposed based on the above technologies. Finally, future research directions for creating new opportunities for scientific research are presented.

Multimodal Serious Games Technologies for Cultural Heritage

Using gamification to transform the adoption of servitization

Subsidiary autonomy and subsidiary performance: A meta-analysis

In this paper we describe the design and development of a multi-touch surface and software that challenges current approaches to the production and consumption of comics. Authorship of the comics involves drawing the 'top level' of the story directly onto paper and projecting lower-level narrative elements, such as objects, characters, dialogue, descriptions and/or events onto the paper via a multi-touch interface. In terms of the impact this has upon the experience of reading and writing, the implementation of paper is intended to facilitate the creation of high-level overviews of stories, while the touch surface allows users to generate branches through the addition of artifacts in accordance with certain theories about interactive narratives. This provides the opportunity to participate in the reading and authoring of both traditional, paper-based texts and interactive, digital scenarios. Prototype comics are used to demonstrate this approach to reading and writing top-level and low-level narratives.

Creating and using interactive narratives: reading and writing branching comics

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a branching comic to compare how readers recall a visual narrative when presented as an interactive, digital program, or as a linear sequence on paper. The layout of the comic is used to visualize this data as heat maps and explore patterns of users' recollections. We describe the theoretical justification for this based upon previous work in narrative visualizations, interactive stories and comics. Having tested the comic with school boys aged 11-12; we saw patterns in the data that complement other research in both interactive stories and visualizations. We argue that the heat maps helped identify these patterns, which have implications for future designs and analyses of interactive visual and/or narrative media.

Daniel Andrews

Papers

Multimodal Serious Games Technologies for Cultural Heritage

Using gamification to transform the adoption of servitization

Subsidiary autonomy and subsidiary performance: A meta-analysis

Creating and using interactive narratives: reading and writing branching comics

Visualizing interactive narratives: employing a branching comic to tell a story and show its readings