- for the impatient: Wikipedia
- for those that have a bit more time to spend and a bit more curiosity to feed here's Tom March's article What WebQuests Are (Really).
Now that we are familiar with the theory we can see that WebQuests promote an active way of learning through the transformation of various web resources and prior knowledge to a learning outcome that students relate to. WebQuests can use different types of tasks (for a classification of WebQuest tasks see A Taxonomy of Tasks) to activate students and stimulate their learning and understanding of a subject.And where can an educator interested in taking his/her students on a WebQuest start? You can browse sites that provide list of WebQuests in different categories (like BestWebQuests.com) or you can make up your own WebQuest. If you want to create your own unique WebQuest I suggest the reading of The 7 Red Flags: Warning Signs when Sifting WebQuests (also by Tom March) that provide some examples that can help you distinguish between real WebQuests and quests that will mostly result in training your student's thumb and index fingers (because of the continual stroking of Command+C and Command+V keys).
Of course, our students aren't the only people that should be taking WebQuests. WebQuests can be a great way of learning - even for educators. If you want to give it a try I suggest following the WebQuest: Leveraging the Latest in Learning Technologies (guess by who? Yes, again Tom March). Through this quest you will try to answer the main question: "What's up with these new technologies and are they any good for learning?" and I think it can be a great exercise to get a bit more familiar with all these new technologies and to think about how they can be used in practice.
I hope these links will encourage some new WebQuests to take place and consequently some new knowledge to be learnt :) And don't forget to share your experience with WebQuests with others in your favorite way!
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