Introduction

In the Spring, 1995 version of EDTEC 596, Tom March and Bernie Dodge drafted a format for web-based lessons. Their early thoughts are captured in the paper Some Thoughts About WebQuest, which was later published in the journal The Distance Educator. In that paper, a WebQuest was defined as:

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. We fret about that.

The Task

To develop great online lessons, 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 CyberGuide and Web Quest 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:

1. Which two of CyberGuide/Web Quest examples are the best ones? Why?
2. Which two are the worst? Why?
3. What do best and worst mean to you?

Resources

Here are the sites you'll be analyzing:

Road Block (HS Mathematics) http://et.sdsu.edu/radair/roadblock/index.htm

The Crucible at http://www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/cruc/cructg.html

Progressive Era & World War I  http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec570/570finalproj/MATF.mywebquest/t-index.htm

Tuskegee Tragedy http://www.filamentality.org/wired/BHM/tuskegee_quest.html  

Return of the Great Game – China, simulation QuickTime http://projects.edtech.sandi.net/kearny/greatgame/

The Process

1. First, each participant will have a hard copy of the worksheet. 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 CyberGuide 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 Standardizer: To you, the best learning activities are those in which students learn to use standards to help identify explicitly what they must know and be able to do. You believe standrads bring what is to be learned into focus and hold learning as a constant. A good CyberGuide is one that sets uniform high expectations for all students; provides a basis for equal opportunity to learn; specifies exactly what will be assessed in order to return more useful information about student achievement and provides indepth standard use.

   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 CyberGuide is one that makes the best use of the technology of the Web. If a CyberGuide 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.

2. Individually, you'll 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. You'll need to examine each site fairly quickly. Don't spend more than 5 minutes on any one site.

   
    

3. When everyone in the group has seen all the sites, it's time to get together to answer the questions. One way to proceed would be to go around and poll each team member for the best two and worst two from their perspective. Pay attention to each of the other perspectives, even if at first you think you might disagree with them.

   
    

4. There will probably not be unanimous agreement, so the next step is to talk together to hammer out a compromise consensus about your team's nominations for best and worst. Pool your perspectives and see if you can agree on what's best for the learner.

   
    

5. When debriefing time is called, each group will report their results to the whole class. Do you think the other groups will agree with your conclusions?

Conclusion

Ideally, this exercise will provide you with a larger pool of ideas to work with on your final project. The best CyberGuide is yet to be written. It might be yours!