A couple of years ago I stumbled upon Bernie Dodge’s website while trying to develop a meaningful learning activity to would expose my learners to the caliber of primary and secondary sources available on the internet and to teach them about extracting valuable information presented within these websites. This occurred during the time I was reading Marianne Weemer’s work on Learner-Centered Teaching. Ideally I wanted to have my learners take a more active role in their own learning as well as provide them a structured assignment that would facilitate their information literacy skills.
Although I never associated the activity with a label or pedagogical framework as promoted by Dodge, I had developed a role playing assignment for my U.S. History survey course on the Decision to Drop the Bomb. In this activity learners were divided into 4 groups– U.S Political, U.S. Military, Manhattan Project Scientists & Japanese Parliment. They were provided 1 lengthy scholarly essay examining key merits/flaws to each group and their views on the Atomic Bomb. Then each group was provided a set (4 to 5) documents of primary sources capturing the competing viewpoints within each group. The scholarly essay as well as the primary documents all came from the internet.
The members of each group were expected to thoroughly read through the primary and secondary sources and then decide by consensus which viewpoint their group would take, they were then expected to develop a policy recommendation to President Truman on whether or not the Atomic Bomb should be used against the Japanese as of July 1945. They would present their recommendation to Pres. Truman verbally in a Town Hall Meeting along with the other three groups. Following their statement they would need to be able to ask and respond to questions from groups that held opposing views on the use of the Atomic Bomb against the Japanese.
Learners were given class time to meet with group member to discuss their group’s historical sources and to form their consensus as well as to prepare questions that would challenge opposing groups’ rationale and to strategize ways to defend their chosen rationale for the use of the Atomic Bomb. An entire class session was set aside for the Town Hall Meeting. At the close of the session, learners were asked to write a reflective essay due in 48 hrs where they were given the opportunity to express their personally held views on the dropping of the Atomic Bomb. In the vast majority of these essays, learners express their new-found knowledge and appreciation for the competing viewpoints of the use of Atomic weaponry.
I used this activity for several semester, and consistently it was one of the most well received graded assignments for each class. And due to the popularity of this format, I expanded my repatoir to include the Federalist/Anti-Federalist Debates, the Abolition Movement, Booker T. Washington Vs W.E.B. DuBois, Key Supreme Court Rulings, and the Civil Rights Movement. These learning activities were used in a range of my face-to-face 100-level and 200-level survey courses that included a diverse mixture of students who were non-majors working to satisfy General Education requirements. Although fewer learners ranked these activities as highly as the Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb activity, I think this may speak to their familiarity with the dropping of the Atomic Bomb and the absence of prior knowledge about other important historical debates.
As I shifted to online teaching, I knew I needed to find a more structured and condensed approach to crafting similar web-based learning activities. After seeing a presentation of mine on campus where I shared the results of my Atomic Bomb assignment, a colleague from the College of Education pointed out the similarities of my assignment to that of a “webquest.” Armed with the term, I embarked upon a Google search and discovered a treasure-trove of WebQuests and literature on the pedagogy of WebQuests. The most constructive information and ideas came from Bernie Dodge’s WebQuest.Org site.
The fact that the vast majority of the literature and available examples are for 12-K applications, should not discourage college profs from seriously considering this tool. I merely adapted the 12-K model to include more rigorous higher level thinking questions as well as carefully selecting websites that required higher levels of reading and critical thinking skills. I have successfully used WebQuests to guide my online learners through life & culture on a plantation during slavery and to be interested observers of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Student feedback for these learning activities has been very positive. However, unlike the face-to-face learners who worked in groups, the online learners complete this activity as individuals in preparation for online discussion forums.
I am trying to do a lit review within various journals to see if I can locate other college-level efforts at using a WebQuest and what strategies they have pursued to make this tool work beyond K-12. I am also interested in discovering other historians who are trying to harness this tool for the purpose of making the past more dynamic and engaging for 21st century digital learners.
