In the Spring of 1995 version of EDTEC 596, Tom March and I drafted a format for web-based lessons. Our early thoughts are captured in the paper Some Thoughts About WebQuests, which was later published in the journal The Distance Educator. In that paper, a WebQuest was defined as:
... an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing.
Since that time, the WebQuest notion, simple though it is, has been adopted and adapted by teachers all over the country. Kathy Schrock in Massachusetts, for example, teaches it to her graduate students and developed an excellent slide show to explain the concept. In some cases, teachers created lessons that went beyond our early ideas; in others, it seems that they picked up on only part of what we were trying to communicate
To develop great webquests, you need to develop a thorough understanding of the different possibilities open to you as you create web-based lessons. One way for you to get there is to critically analyze a number of webquest examples and discuss them from multiple perspectives. That's your task in this exercise.
By the end of this lesson, you and your group will answer these questions:
Here are the sites you'll be analyzing:
First, print out one copy of the worksheet for each participant. To answer the questions given above, you'll break into groups of four. Within the group, each of you will take on one of the following roles:
The Efficiency
Expert: You value time a great deal. You
believe that too much time is wasted in today's classrooms on
unfocused activity and learners not knowing what they should be doing
at a given moment. To you, a good WebQuest is one that delivers the
most learning bang for the buck. If it's a short, unambitious
activity that teaches a small thing well, then you like it. If it's a
longterm activity, it had better deliver a deep understanding of the
topic it covers, in your view.
The
Affiliator: To you, the best learning
activities are those in which students learn to work together.
WebQuests that force collaboration and create a need for discussion
and consensus are the best in your view. If a WebQuest could be done
by a student working alone, it leaves you cold.
The
Altitudinist: Higher level thinking is
everything to you. There's too much emphasis on factual recall in
schools today. The only justification for bringing technology into
schools is if it opens up the possibility that students will have to
analyze information, synthesize multiple perspectives, and take a
stance on the merits of something. You also value sites that allow
for some creative expression on the part of the learner.
The
Technophile: You love this internet thang.
To you, the best WebQuest is one that makes the best use of the
technology of the Web. If a WebQuest has attractive colors, animated
gifs, and lots of links to interesting sites, you love it. If it
makes minimal use of the Web, you'd rather use a worksheet.
Within your groups, then, examine each of the sites on the list of resources and use the worksheet to jot down some notes of your opinions of each from the perspective of your role.
When everyone in the group has seen all the sites, then it's time to get togther to answer the questions. One person in each group should open up SimpleText to record the group's thoughts. Use this file to speak from as you report your results to the whole class.
You'll need to examine each site fairly quickly. Don't spend more than 10 minutes on any one site. When you get together with all four members of your group, pay attention to each of the other perspectives, even if at first you think you might disagree with it.
Ideally, this exercise will provide you with a larger pool of ideas to work with on your final project. The best WebQuest is yet to be written. It might be yours!