The Question May Not Actually Be A Question...

I found this reading to be particularly difficult to follow. Now, some of this may be due to the fact that that by viewing it via Blackboard, if I click on some of the links, it was nearly impossible to get back to the point where I left the 'main reading' without going all the way back through the menu trees and starting at the Week 7/8 reading section again.

This organizational detail not withstanding, I still found the author's 'webquest within a webquest' mode unhelpful. At the same time, I found myself agreeing with several of the points and questions that were raised. For example, focusing on formulating modes of questioning for students that motivate them to dig deeply, rather than broadly, into subject matter, is a key insight, and one which the Webquest format lends itself to quite readily. The format also requires the teacher to be very familiar with the material that he or she is trying to present, since, in my experience of constructing my own webquest for class, I had to do a great deal of research and sifting through websites, screening them for the types and quality of information that I wanted to present to my students. Unlike many areas of study, where the teacher may have a certain expertise and point of view in presenting the material, the sheer volume of available data can rapidly become overwhelming for the instructor, let alone the students who need to use the data as a resource for coursework. This breadth of information can be quite useful when trying to expose students to a variety of approaches to the material, but if students are just being introduced to the topic, especially if it is a complex one, it requires a great deal of 'info-pruning' to make sure that the material is pertinent and accessible to students.

Of particular note, I find the final step of the process, 'Field Testing' to be one of the most challenging for me personally. In the process of working on and developing my webquest, I found that I became so familiar with the material, and the way in which I had chosen to organize it, that I presumed that the way I had done so was both clear and concise and logically organized. I am not sure that this is always the case, in reality. For the most part, I still believe that the way in which I organized is still good and valid, but there are times where I think that my own personal 'group-think' may have either over-complicated some of the material or that some of the logical connections I had made, knowing the outcomes I was trying to achieve, made the organization of the material more complicated than it needed to be.

I also appreciate Bernie Dodge's explanations of intent as an inquiry-based mode of learning. As a devotee' of the Socratic Method, I am sympathetic to this aim and given the variety of resources for inquiry available via the web, it is a worthy use of the medium.

Ultimately though, I do not find that the webquest format is something radically new and different in and of itself, but rather, I find that it is just a different method of organizing a set of information. On any given subject, I can attempt to tailor the information I need to get across to students in variety of ways so that students of different learning styles can grasp the information. The webquest is another format for doing so, but it also offers the opportunity to present the information in several different ways within a single core structure such that different styled learners can mine one core resource for a presentation of the information that best suits their learning needs.