UK govt mulls Twitter lessons

British schoolchildren may soon be studying the tweets of Ashton Kutcher along with the sonnets of Shakespeare, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

A leaked government report, due to be released shortly, recommends British primary school teachers be given much more flexibility in deciding what lessons to teach.

While it emphasises the continued necessity of teaching traditional subjects such as spelling, history and arithmetic, it also recommends students be taught about online media and instructed about Web-based skills, including how to use a spelling checker.

Google prides itself on setting trends, but it appears to be copying some of its smaller rivals with the latest refinements to the way it displays Internet search results, says MercuryNews.com.

After months of testing, Google tweaked its technology on Tuesday to occasionally display longer descriptions of Web sites in response to search requests consisting of several words. The expanded snippets will contain three or four lines from Web sites instead of the usual one or two lines.

The switch is designed to give Google's audience a better sense of what information a Web site has even before users click on the link.

Video images of Chinese police beating Tibetans as they lie trussed-up on the ground may have prompted the country's censors to block access to YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site, according to Times Online.

The video released by the Tibetan “government-in-exile” at the weekend quickly made its way on to the site, which has been freely accessible in China since before the Beijing Olympics, in August last year.

China has offered no official confirmation that it has blocked the California-based Web site, or any reason why it might want to bar its people from seeing images available on it.

Nintendo, aiming to keep up its momentum, unveiled a portable video game device for the US market with new ways to play games interactively, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The new device, called DSi, was launched in Japan in November and is now rolling out internationally. It is thinner and has a larger screen than the previous DS Lite model, which was launched three years ago.

The DSi also includes new features, such as a digital camera and access to a new virtual store, from which users can download applications. It will be available in Europe and the US in early April for $169.