Gidson may well have been describing a WebQuest. The differences are obvious – there’s no computer involved for a start. However, the similarities are also clear. In the quotation, the birthday boy followed a trail of clues to find his gift. In a WebQuest, students follow a trail of information on websites to achieve a learning outcome. A WebQuest consists of a topic description, a list of relevant Web resources and a set of task requirements and processes.  It is a remarkably versatile instructional approach that promotes inquiry-based learning.

The very nature of a WebQuest can put students in touch with digital libraries, primary source documents, multimedia presentations, research documents and all other types of objects available in the World Wide Web. Some people refer to the Web as a virtual encyclopaedia however, there are significant differences. An encyclopaedia is carefully researched, bias-free, organised, cross-referenced written by professionals and relatively static. On the other hand, information and objects found on the Web can be published by anyone, biased, opinionated, chaotic, volatile and completely unsupported by any research. While encyclopaedias can be relied on, the information on the Web cannot. And yet, the new generation of students tends to turn to the Web first and an encyclopaedia… sometimes never.

Another consideration is that

“the Web is full of useless junk. Because of its incomprehensible hugeness, something of everything is on the Web: undesirable junk, indecipherable university research, incomplete arguments, yesterday's forgotten and rotting postings. But, hovering side-by-side with these in cyberspace are also desirable gems like the Library of Congress, up-to-the-minute reporting like that on CNN Interactive, and the persuasive Web sites created by students in the ThinkQuest project.” (Tom March)

Despite being web savvy, many students aren’t able to work effectively on WebQuest tasks. WebQuests rely on students’ ability to navigate through the Web to find information, solve problems and complete tasks. Although many students are able to “surf” the Net, they many not be able to effectively negotiate their way through the volume of available information or differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources. As a result, WebQuests are most effective when the teacher has provided a level of structure sufficient to ensure valuable time isn’t wasted in unnecessary net surfing but still encourages a degree of self-regulated learning. After all, one of the goals of a WebQuest is to develop information-seeking skills and the ability to locate, identify and synthesize relevant information for a specific task.

Tom March outlines three hard-to-argue-with reasons for using the WebQuest approach.

The first of these is that WebQuests promote student motivation by virtue of the authenticity of the process. WebQuests centre around a question that really needs answering, encourages students to use contemporary tools and sources of information and to interact and rely on others to achieve the task. The best bit is that in the end, they can add the result of their WebQuest to the web itself!

March’s second reason is that WebQuests develop thinking skills.

“Built into the WebQuest process are the strategies of cognitive psychology and constructivism. …the question posed to students cannot be answered simply by collecting and spitting back information. A WebQuest forces students to transform information into something else: a cluster that maps out the main issues, a comparison, a hypothesis, a solution, etc. “

Cooperative learning is March’s third reason for using WebQuests. Typically, a WebQuest question is something large, complex or controversial. Such questions can’t be answered in full by a single student. Nor is there necessarily one right answer. Several groups of students may work in parallel with each other on the same WebQuest, each group arriving at a different answer. Not only do individual students learn to work in their own group, they also learn that for some of the larger questions in life there is more than one answer and each is equally valid.

Essential Reading about WebQuests

The WebQuest Page
http://webquest.sdsu.edu/

Building Blocks of a WebQuest
http://projects.edtech.sandi.net/staffdev/buildingblocks/p-index.htm

The WebQuest Design Process
http://webquest.sdsu.edu/designsteps/index.html
 
[links current as at 09/07/04]

Bibliography

WebQuesting: The Influence of Task Structure and Web Site Design on Learning. S. Kim MacGregor, Louisiana State University with Yiping Lou and Emily Young http://center.uoregon.edu/conferences/ISTE/NECC2004/program/search_results_details.php?sessionid=325375 [link current as at 09/07/04]

Why WebQuests? An introduction. Tom March http://www.ozline.com/webquests/intro.html [link current as at 09/07/04]