Laptops in a classroom can increase engagement, attentiveness, participation and learning, according to a study of college students, published by this month's edition of the journal Computers & Education.

However, like any other aid to education, the instructor must set the right stage for the laptop to help the learning process, rather than hinder it.

"If you allow laptops in the classroom without a plan for how you'll use them, you can potentially invite disaster. It's unlikely that students will be so entranced by class material that they won't wander off to their favourite social networking sites," says University of Michigan professor Perry Samson.

To help teachers worldwide, he has developed free software, LectureTools, that he believes helps ensure that the students stay engaged. LectureTools calls on students to interact with the subject being taught at any one time. Instructors at about 400 colleges and universities have set up accounts to use it.

The software also allows students to take notes directly on lecture slides. They can anonymously ask an instructor's aide a question using chat, while others can see these questions and answers. The software also allows students to rate their understanding of each slide.

Samson makes the software available to any teacher or instructor free of charge, so if any in Bermuda want to test it out go to www.lecturetools.com. Let me know if it helps.

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Yes, I was one of those hundreds of thousands of people who ended up using almost five million hours of work time playing Google's version of Pac-Man. It was a walk back into time for many of us. I would love to see the age group breakdown of that stat as gathered by software company Rescue Time, which was reporting on Google's celebration on May 21 of the 30th anniversary of the launch of the addictive computer game.

Google re-did the game as part of its logo on the day, making it interactive. While I did not play it at work, it was still up on the site when I woke up early Saturday morning in Europe, so while the household slept, I played . . . and played.

Rescue Time studied a group of 11,000 Internet users to figure out how much time was lost at work, as employees started to play the game.

Using eye-tracking software and other recording devices Rescue Time figures that on a typical day the average Google user spends about four-and-a-half active minutes on Google search per day, spread over about 22 page views.

That works out to about 11 seconds for each Google page view. Compared to previous Fridays, the "Pac-Man D-Day" resulted in the average user spending 36 seconds more on Google.com, hence the calculation of five million hours of productivity lost. You can still waste a few hours at: http://www.google.com/pacman.

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Even though Facebook plans to amend its controversial privacy settings this week, an anti-Facebook movement has started at QuitFacebookDay.com, a site that suggests some alternatives. I will actually stay on Facebook, mainly due to laziness and the long process it took to connect with people who I had considered lost to time.

The site itself says there are no direct replacements but notes that the Diaspora project might result in a viable alternative. Let me know if you have found alternatives and share them with others.

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How many cows does it take to power 1,000 servers? About 10,000, says HP, which has suddenly found greenness and wants to reduce its energy consumption.

Researchers at HP Labs have published a paper on a study they did on using cow manure from dairy farms and cattle feedlots to generate electricity for the company's server farm to arrive at the figure. You can read the study at: www.hpl.hp.com. Critics have called the idea impractical, as there is hardly any farm over 5,000 cows in the US.

Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.