WebQuests at NECC!

There was plenty of WebQuest activity in New Orleans this year. Seventeen sessions made mention of the term in their descriptions, and 11 made WebQuests their major focus:

The WebQuest Users and Doers Birds of a Feather session Tuesday had over 60 attendees actively engaged in conversation and resource sharing. Blogs and Wikis as WebQuest Tasks showed how the model can incorporate these two new web formats.

Staying on the Same Page: WebQuests across the Curriculum was a followup session from last year describing a PT3 grant involving the University of Illinois and Danville District 118. Midge Shuff of Rowan University had a poster session showing WebQuests done in two elementary districts.

Tom March did a workshop and a spotlight session WebQuests: The Fulcrum for Systemic Curriculum Improvement.

Midge Shuff of Rowan University had a poster session showing WebQuests done in two elementary districts. Maureen Yoder of Lesley University described the nine year history of the format. Carol Shelton and Bridget Craft showed student work performed as a result of standards-based WebQuests.

Two research papers were a welcome addition to the last session of the conference: The Use of WebQuest as a Constructivist Learning Tool in Secondary School Geography in Singapore, by Chew Hung Chang, Nanyang Technological University; and WebQuesting: The Influence of Task Structure and Web Site Design on Learning, by S. Kim MacGregor, Yiping Lou and Emily Young, Louisiana State University. These two papers are available as PDF files. I hope they'll inspire other researchers to add to the (still) small WebQuest literature.