Unfolded WebQuest / Workshop Play along

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Prior Knowledge

What are WebQuests? – Understanding the concept

Go to the KnowledgeBuilding wiki page and choose a question to answer.

Do you want to explore some examples?

Primary – Big Wide World
Middle – Crool Zone, Look Who’s Footing the Bill!, Little Rock 9 – Integration 0?
Secondary – Freedom Fighter or Terrorist, Ewe2, Searching for China

New Documents

Tom’s Current WebQuest 2.0 Process (pdf)
Use the article above and the Designing a WebQuest 2.0 (doc) and the links below as a guide.

1) Learn to Look

Go to this example of a Look to Learn activity and add your comments

Whose Future: from visionShift to Sixth Sense in less than 15 years.

2) StixyBoard

Contribute “post-its” to an open StixyBoard. Make your posts, images or documents relate to the roles, perspectives, people, industries, stakeholders, etc. that would have a vested interest in Sixth Sense technology. These can be for “good” or “evil”.

3) Clipmarks

Use Clipmarks to gather sections of Webpages into collections that you can use again anywhere. (here is a short example on “climate change“). To use Clipmarks you’ll need the browser button and an account.

Hint: Do a Google search for a related topic (personal technologies, digital addiction, m commerce, etc.), then open any interesting links in new tabs. This way you can easily add content from separate sites into one Clipmarks “clipping.” You can watch a video to get an idea of how this works if you like.

4) Diigo

Diigo is a great tool (and about to get even better). It goes far beyond the social Bookmarking of Delicious to allow for groups, forums, and highlighting and commenting on passages of articles. Try it out.

Join Diigo, this group and download the toolbar.
Then add your comments and links to this Diigo Forum.
Now add your highlights and comments to this article.

5) Pageflakes

Go to this Pageflakes Pagecast on emerging technologies. Skim through the posts, listen to a podcast or two, etc. Your goal is to find something that creates sparks for you, that prompts you toward an opinion or insight related to emerging technologies and their potential impact.

6) WordPress / Ning

If you’ve gotten this far, you must have (at least) a few blogs of your own. So that our comments can be in one place, I’ll change horses here and shift to a Ning network so we can have a shared space. The idea (in terms of WebQuests) is that you have now progressed from being exposed to a complex / challenging topic, to exploring some aspect of it to the point that you now have an informed insight to share.

7) Scaffold Thinking

Other than Inspiration and Webspiration, there are many other free versions of mindmapping software available. After trying probably a half dozen of the top online versions and finding something that was goofy or buggy about them, I have settled on Tuft University’s VUE – Visual Understanding Environment. VUE is cross platform and worth the time to sort out and get students well-versed with its potential. If you must have an online variety (which makes sense for this demo) try the interesting Exploratree from FutureLab or Mind42.com. Map out your evolving knowledge of the subject you’ve been pursuing. You might like to edit this Word doc that structures the Group process (from Freedom Fighter or Terrorist WebQuest)

8) Prompt Transforming Information to Understanding

Because it’s among the most popular (amazingly) sites I’ve done, I’ll include the ThesisBuiler javascript. Far from Web 2, I made this site back in 1996, but it has some of Web 2’s interactivity and might be helpful in moving students toward a persuasive (or cause & effect, etc.) thesis statement. A truly Web 2 application we sould play with is Decide, Already. Go ahead and help me out with this decision (or get trickier and rank the options). Try this Group Process page from Freedom Fighter or Terrorist)

9) Contribute to the Real World

Once learners have constructed new meaning / transformed info to understanding / “have something new to to say”, let’s share this great work with the world. Among the easiest ways to do this is through a Wiki (such as Wikispaces or PBWorks/Wiki. A more flexible and powerful platform is to use WordPress as a ClassPortal. A ClassPortal is simply a way of using a blog to support a community of learners as they engage in ongoing study of a particular topic (you can read more about ClassPortals here). As a site to support 9th grade students exploring current issues that relate to their new future, I whacked-up the 2020 Vision ClassPortal complete with Pageflakes feed, embedded video and podcasts. Once you get over the learning curves, you can do something like this in a couple hours.