From the desk of Mr. Walters

My character in a starting area. It's time to get my nerd on! After reading the testimonies of countless educators, being inspired by J ane McGonigal's first TED talk , and reading " WoW in School; a hero's journey ", I finally took the plunge. I am trying World of Warcraft . This shall be interesting... I hope to get some experience with this game and perhaps con some friends (& preferably colleagues) into coming online with me. So far, after playing for about a week, I have more questions than answers. For example, does my player need to eat? There certainly is a lot of food around but I've been fasting this whole time. I can read extensive articles on the wiki about food, food types, food preparation, and even feeding pets in the game. Nothing tells me whether my character will eventually drop dead from starvation. That would be interesting... I'd be happy to accept any tips from you, my blogosphere peeps (& tweeps ) on this one. I ...

Collaboration, it's one of the 21st century skills. There's pretty much unanimous agreement among policy-makers, academic thinkers, and business leaders that collaboration must be a crucial part of our classrooms. Incidentally, there is almost unanimous agreement among teachers and students that group work is painful, cumbersome, annoying, and largely counter-productive. Even popular reality  shows rely on group assignments to weed out contestants and create unnecessary drama. Why is something that is so important and crucial to our survival, so painful and dreadful? How can we make it more awesome? What do we do with collaboration? Part 1: Why you hate group work. Before our winter holiday break, I informally polled students in my classes. In all of my sections but one, 100% of my students noted that they hate doing group work. In one class two students said that they love group assignments because they can usually con their group mates into doing all of the work. Wh...