Learning to encourage the on-line search for knowledge

I recently co-taught a course entitled, Integrating Technology into the Curriculum via WebQuests, at Teachers College, Columbia University. Our class was made up of a group of teachers and non-teachers from the New York area, and as far away as Greece. Here's what it was all about

The brainchild of Bernie Dodge, a WebQuest is a simple yet effective way of integrating information technology into any subject. Indeed, what better way to satisfy young inquiring minds than to set them on a guided search for information on the Internet? "Look here", "Go there", and soon they'll all be on the hunt.

According to Dodge, a WebQuest is 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. A short term WebQuest, designed to be completed in a couple of class periods, should introduce students to a significant amount of new information and provide them the opportunity to make sense of what they have learned. A long term WebQuest, on the other hand, gives the learner the chance to analyse, extend and refine the knowledge they have acquired. These tend to last between one week and one month, during which time students would create some activity, based on their understanding, for others to do. (http://webquest.sdsu.edu/)

Dodge's site features over a thousand WebQuests, with more being added on a regular basis. Divided into three categories, Top, Middling and New, each group consist of further divisions according to subject and grade level, forming a matrix. There are also easy-to-use templates for designing WebQuests, as well as a link to an on-line graduate course Teaching with WebQuests designed by Bernie and wife June. Make sure you read the WebQuest Taskonomy, which describes in detail 12 types of culminating WebQuest activities.

There are five main parts to a WebQuest: The Introduction, The Task, The Process, Evaluation and The Conclusion; Credits & References are usually included also. Some WebQuests also include a Teacher Section with necessary background information, which teachers might find useful. Even though every WebQuest must utilise the Internet, they are not limited to a search of Web pages. Students can be allowed or even encouraged to use books and other sources of information. Neither does a WebQuest have to be hosted on the Internet. I created my first WebQuest back in the summer of 2001 while studying at Teachers College. At the time I was teaching at the American International School in Freetown, and had to take into consideration that our small school, then having only 12 students, had very limited access to the Internet; only one computer was hooked up via dial-up connection. So I designed my WebQuest, Pollution Solutions, using HyperStudio and allowed for the downloading of the necessary websites onto a shared folder on the local area network (LAN), thereby providing access to all six computers in the lab. It worked!

The key to designing a good WebQuest is assigning students a task, which is authentic and allows learners to focus their time on using information rather than looking for it. Dodge tells us in his taskonomy that tasks can involve Retelling, Compilation, Design, Consensus building, Persuasion, Self-Knowledge, Analysis, and Judgement, or they can be Journalistic, Mystery, Scientific or Creative product; the following diagram provides one possible classification of these activities under the six main categories of understanding:

Take for example the following task defined by Merdene, one of our summer students, in her WebQuest: The Great Depression - Who or What is to Blame?

"The representative with portfolio for your sector has been summoned to appear before a Tribunal of Inquiry, which was set up to investigate the circumstances surrounding the causes and effects of the Great Depression. Your task is to help him/her present a persuasive argument to convince members of the tribunal, that your sector cannot be held responsible for the causes and effects of the Great Depression. You must include quantitative and qualitative data to support your argument".

Such a task will certainly engage the higher-level thinking skill of students especially if they are directed to good quality websites, typically listed under the Process section of the WebQuest. Search engines and directories provided by Google and Yahoo are easy to master and can take students to corners of the web they'd never imagined existed. One of my favourite sources of Web information is Thomas, an online database of current legislative information found at http://thomas.loc.gov/ , where learners can view an image of the original, now faded, copy of the Declaration of Independence dating back to 1776.

Another of our student named Jack, in his WebQuest on Empires, designed tasks so his class of eight students could work as one group but divided the process into six different assignments, to be worked on during the different subjects he teaches, language, maths and history, so that Empires becomes a theme not just a project for one course.

Merdene chose to break her students up into these four groups: Economists, Politicians, Representatives for Internal Affairs and Representatives for Social and Environmental Affairs. Geoff Morris in his recent In-service Day talk to faculty reminded us that students often learn better when working in groups, and he made mention of some practical considerations to be taken into account when organising young learners into groups, size and mix.

Johnson and Johnson, in their article An Overview of Cooperative Learning (2000), have this to say: a successful cooperative learning environment must include the following attributes:

• learners perceive that they cannot succeed without one another
• students teach and applaud each other as they wrestle with authentic work
• the group is held accountable for completing the task and each person is held accountable for completing his or her own part
• many people (including adults) need to be taught how to work as part of a team
• conversation about how to improve the group’s effectiveness should be built into the process

By having learners in a group each read a different Web page or by having them provide different perspectives on the same Web content provides a means of creating individual responsibility towards the task.

What students are asked to do with the information they find can often define the success of a WebQuest.  WebQuests can even go as far as asking students to design a WebQuest for other students to take.  A recent article in the ISTE Leading & Learning magazine featured the work of a High School chemistry teacher whose Chemistry1 students were assigned the task of creating a WebQuest on the topic, Nuclear Issues of the 21st Century.  After an introductory brainstorming session led by the teacher, her 48 students were divided up into groups according to their responses, under the categories of history, science, future technology, engineering, and public opinion.  Each group, equipped with a “Webmaster”, then set about creating their WebQuest following guidelines given by their teacher.  The class collectively decided on a grading rubric for their WebQuests.  Overall, the experience proved most beneficial for the students because, as part of the process they forced to make interdisciplinary connections, develop their synthesizing and communication skills, as well as practice collaborating and presenting with their peers.

Weblogs or blogs are now becoming a regular feature in WebQuests.  The term web log, coined back in December 1997 by Jorn Barger, refers to a website that includes a mix of links, commentaries, and personal notes, reflecting the blogger’s (one who writes blogs) thoughts on a particular subject or wide range of subjects.  These online journals are often updated several times daily and can link to pages created by another blogger, making it possible for conversations to be ongoing by several bloggers simultaneously. One of the tasks in a WebQuest could involve students keeping a blog in which information is discussed and developed.  Judith Cramer, with whom I taught the course at Columbia has designed a ‘BlogQuest’ for high school Journalism and English teachers, To Blog or Not to Blog, located online at http://www.columbia.edu/~jc1427/BlogQuest.html

Last but not least, a WebQuest challenge students by asking them to do things outside of the ordinary.  In Merdene’s case, her students working on the Great Depression WebQuest culminated the activity with a trial in which each group put together their findings in the form of a speech, which they presented before a tribunal made up of other students. Jack’s WebQuest required that his students, in one of the assignments, build an Empire capable of surviving the challenges that had defeated real ones.

These kinds of ‘scaffolding’ can help learners become more comfortable with Web resources and often provide us teachers the opportunity of seeing a side of them we would otherwise not encounter in the traditional classroom setting.  Bernie Dodge, in his National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2000 presentation, Thinking Visually with WebQuests, discusses three types of scaffolding in WebQuests: reception — learners become comfortable with finding and extracting information from the Web, transformation — learners transform the information gathered into new forms, and production — learners create new products.  Because all three are built into the process of the WebQuest, the bar of what students can produce is raised, making their resource-based learning experiences both productive and enjoyable.

References:

Dodge, B. J. (1995) Some thoughts about WebQuests [Online] Available at: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/about_webquests.html
Dodge, B. J.(2000)  Thinking visually with WebQuests [Online] Available at: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/tv/#
Johnson, D. W. & Johnson, T. R. (2000) An Overview of Cooperative Learning [Online] Available at:  http://www.co-operation.org/pages/overviewpaper.html
Peterson, C. L. & Koeck, D. C. (2001) When Students Create Their Own WebQuests.  Learning & Leading with Technology; volume 29 no. 1
Various other resources, including student projects, from MSTU 4835.006: Integrating Technology into the Curriculum via WebQuests, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York