Homeschooling with World of Warcraft

Actually, it's called "unschooling," but not many people know what the term means: basically, homeschooling "without the trappings of formal education," LiveScience.com reports, such as textbooks or even traditional subjects covered separately. Subjects that are covered unconventionally, e.g., in World of Warcraft, are "math, reading, sociology, economics, creative writing and communications." Unschoolers such as a mom mentioned in the LiveScience article, Jill Parmer, teach by learning about and fostering the interests of their children. One of Jill's kids' interests is World of Warcraft, so she plays the 10 million+-member game with them and "helps lead a group of homeschool kids and parents in a WoW guild called 'Horde of Unschoolers'." She has watched her 10-year-old "make his own learning connections between WoW and other areas in life," according to LiveScience. "One day he became interested in the mathematical concept of exponential increases after his WoW character encountered a disease cloud." University of Wisconsin researcher Constance Steinkuehler told LiveScience she has seen 8th- and 9th-graders playing WoW go from "barely stringing together two sentences to writing lengthy posts in their group's Web site forum, where they discuss detailed strategies for gearing up their virtual characters and figuring out tough quests." She gets a lot of surprised looks, even from players, when she tells them that "85% of the conversations [in the official WoW forum] showed that players had decent levels of scientific literacy. Players used reasoned arguments, backed up hypotheses and even brought statistics to bear on issues that they faced near the higher levels of the game."

Online high school: Rapid growth

By 2019, half of all courses in grades 9-12 will be delivered online, according to Enrollment in online classes, according to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. But for data closer to today, "enrollment in online classes last year reached the 1 million mark, growing 22 times the level seen in 2000," the Christian Science Monitor reports, citing figures from the North American Council for Online Learning. The efficiency of distance learning, the low cost of delivering, and its flexibility for students who do better outside of conventional school are reasons cited for its rapid growth. Of course, states are all over the map in what they allow and require. Check out the article for details and note the views of professor Luis Huerta at Columbia University and researcher David Reed at Arizona State University.