This research study investigated whether playing a digital game, Wii Bowling, with others can enhance the social life of older adults. Our research used a mixedmethods approach. Results showed that players' levels of social connectedness increased and loneliness declined over an 8-week period. Qualitative results described participants' perceptions of their interactions with others, conversations with family and friends, social connections, and the team experience relating to playing in the multiweek, multilocation Wii Bowling tournament.

This study is grounded in a social-cultural framework that embeds learning in social activities, mediated by cultural tools and occurring through guided participation in the social practice of a particular community. It uses conversation analysis as a tool to examine the structures of the talk-in-interaction of naturally occurring conversations between 11 pairs of older adult (aged between 65 and 92) and undergraduates (aged between 18 and 25) during a 6-week social practice of intergenerational digital gameplay. The purpose is to demonstrate how older adults adapt to and make sense of collaborative gaming activities through guided participation. The features of minimum gap and overlap, even conversational inputs, and orientation to one another's turns indicate interactional connection between older adults and younger people. Adjacency pairs in the form of question-answer and self-initiated other-repairs are the situated use of social resources afforded by the intergenerational interaction. It is through these two main means of interaction that younger players offer immediate feedback and explanation to guide older adults to engage in the collaborative play and develop understanding of unfolding concepts and phenomena.

Case studies are the basis of a well-known medical education pedagogy called problem-based learning (PBL). Traditional case studies are paper based and contain brief medical facts about a patient's illness. The authors of this article argue for a rich-narrative PBL design, and they report on a pilot project that incorporated such a design. The term "rich narrative" in this article covers two attributes. The first is the development of case studies that are rich in narrative information (often called "thick narrative"). The second component of rich narrative is the presentation of these thick narrative case studies in a media-rich format-that is, video rather than the traditional paper-based cases. Rich-narrative case studies may provide a more robust context for learning than traditional case studies because the rich cases more accurately reflect the complex reality of patient presentation and interaction. They also may help to lay the foundation for the development of a more holistic and patient-centered awareness during the training of health professionals. The use of video as a case presentation tool adds to this robust depiction of the patient as a complete human being rather than a collection of written symptoms. The authors discuss the power of narrative in learning, the significance of rich-narrative in medical education, the steps they took to develop a video-based, rich-narrative case study for online PBL tutorials at Simon Fraser University, and the evaluation of their prototype used in 2008.

The web has the potential to offer an environment that can support standardized medical education to students dispersed in time or place and, in the process, respond to reduced availability of patients for practice. This exploratory article describes how we evaluated critical thinking in an online collaborative Problem-based Learning (PBL) tutorial built on a platform integrating a well-known course management system and a voice-over the Internet communications tool. We discuss the process and results of evaluating the tutorials by adapting and applying an earlier framework used to measure the level of critical thinking taking place in collaborative online PBL tutorials. Our results indicate that this framework could be used as a method to compare levels of critical thinking between tutorial groups as well as tutorial variables such as case study formats and the types of technology used to support the sessions. The project is entitled "Simulation and Advanced Gaming Environments (SAGE) for Learning and is a bilingual research project with more than 30 researchers, 14 universities, 30 partners studying how technology-based games and simulations can support learning.

No abstract