Sometimes I was a little frustrated with the Instructional Technology M.Ed. tract at Kent. It’s a good program. The professors are excellent. But the material is definitely slanted toward K-12, which is great if you are a K-12 educator. So quite honestly, when I saw the WebQuest assignment and looked at the San Diego site, I shook my head, rolled my eyes and wondered when in higher ed I would EVER use that.
Then it hit me–self paced training, workshops, and the like. Since I want to be an instructional designer in higher ed and one of my responsibilities might be to develop professional development workshops that include technology, I think an awesome WebQuest would be one that explored effective tools for the classroom. The WQ can focus on a single tool, a wiki for instance. A WQ like this could be used by a participant individually at their own pace. Or if it was part of a workshop, different participants could choose different tools and discuss their finding within the group.
If the tool in the WQ was a wiki, the task would be to research a wiki, and to discuss ways the wiki could be used in the educator’s classroom. One of the tasks would also be to sign up for a wiki. Part of the tasks would be to read about wikis and watch videos on how they can be used, etc.
I like it; I hope I can make it work.
MaryAnne Nestor 