WebQuest Blossoms

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 9/1/2005

Bernie Dodge hopes his popular WebQuests will flourish even more profusely with his latest offering—QuestGarden (webquest.org).

A professor of education technology at San Diego State University, Dodge designed WebQuests, learning activities in which students gather information on a given topic via the Web, in 1995. Today, the concept is so ubiquitous that the term WebQuest registered 664,000 page hits on Google, beating out “Kleenex” at 476,000 Web pages.

Dodge says he designed WebQuest as “a natural evolution” of his teaching. “I made them just to be a better teacher,” he says. “The Web was new and I saw people using it trivially. I wanted a model that would engage higher-level teaching skills, but be deliberately simple based on the technology. I designed [WebQuests] to engage kids on authentic problems and help kids work collaboratively.”

But WebQuests have been occasionally difficult for teachers to construct, admits Dodge. “There’s a lot of work that goes into creating it,” he says. Those seeking to create a WebQuest must know how to use Web Editor software and have a server that can host the product, as well as enough time to build the program.

Dodge believes QuestGarden will simplify the process by hosting the new WebQuests on his server and by making the template easier to use. The new program will be free for the first year, but cost $20 for a two-year subscription after that to pay for Dodge’s server fees.

Although he was approached a few years ago by a “second-generation dot-com,” says Dodge, he has yet to turn WebQuests into a for-profit business. Still, interest has persisted because new programs are constantly being created—not surprising as they’re one teaching tool that has been free to create and free to use.

Dodge lists approximately 2,000 WebQuests on his site (webquest.sdsu.edu), complete with ratings, but he believes there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of others on the Internet. But most, says Dodge, aren’t very good—possibly created by unmotivated teaching students as assignments. Which is why he hopes the new version of his software might encourage teachers to focus on the teaching aspect of the WebQuest that they’re trying to create—rather than having to pour energy into their architecture.

“Now built into the model are guides that nudge teachers in the right direction,” he says. “Because left unguided, these can be nothing more than drill sheets.”