A common thread: The power of the question

What is interesting about innovative educational strategies is that often have a driving question behind them. If research questions and quests are framed skillfully, they require a good driving question or sets of questions.

This reminds me of the 2004 article written by Peter Jarvis in the British Journal of Theological Education where he advocates that in the information age, it is a pedagogy of question rather than the ability to provide answers that is critical in educational practice.

Library resources Webquest

Introduction:

Research purpose:

To visit and evaluate online resources which are suppose to support teaching and learning of the Bible

Problem scenario:
The SBC library is seeking to develop a section in its website which contains web resources which may be useful for members of the SBC community. However, because of the vastness and the permissive nature of the Internet, these resources need to be vetted, evaluated, classified and have brief accompanying descriptive write up about the site. Only then can they find their place in the SBC website.

The Library staff have thus requested students in the CE 501 class to help with building a set of trustworthy and helpful resources. The following links have been provided by them:


http://www.thebricktestament.com/

http://www.bibleplaces.com/

http://www.holylandphotos.org/

http://quizstar.4teachers.org/

http://www.studylight.org/enc/isb/

http://www.atla.com/digitalresources/browsecoll.asp

http://ebibletools.bigbible.org/

http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=2055

http://www.churchworldservice.org/decisions/

http://www.wels.net/wmc/html/clip_art_graphics.html

http://www.ebibleteacher.com/images.html

http://www.biblepicturegallery.com/


http://www.easytestmaker.com/

http://www.shipoffools.com/church/

http://www.xxxchurch.com/

http://www.gutenberg.org/

http://www.anova.org/

http://www.audiotreasure.com/


http://cfdl.auckland.ac.nz/hebrew/

http://www.digbible.org/tour/index.html

http://www.internetseminary.org/

Software

http://www.e-sword.net/

http://www.activestories.com/index.html

http://www.openoffice.org/

http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/


http://www.ntgateway.com/maps.htm

http://www.bibleresourcecenter.org/Learning/multimedia/maps/


http://www.pohick.org/sts/

http://www.biblegateway.org

http://www.anova.org/sev/atlas/htm/



http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/docs/refmaps.html

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/

http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all&collection=HebrewIlluminatedMan&col_id=172


Task:
The Library staff have given our task group an initial list of 30 Internet links which have been shortlisted from 100 submitted sites. This is the first stage of the Library Internet Resource Development project which aims at serving the Christian public drawing attention to helpful, free resources from the Internet.

Inspite of having been shortlisted, these links require a second round of screening and evaluation for suitability. If there are no reasons why they need to be weeded out, the sites need to be categorized. In addition, short accompanying annotations describing what they are and how they can be useful for members of the SBC constituency need to be written up.

You will be divided into 4 groups: A, B, C, and D. Groups A and B will focus on links 1-15 while Groups C and D will focus on links 16-30.

For each group, please visit all the 15 links you are researching, and suggest categories which the library could use to classify them by.

Present your findings for each of the sites



If there are any problematic sites, please

, and list which ones you would weed out. Discuss in your groups the value Give reasons why you would include or exclude the links in your list from the SBC resources websites.

For links you would recommend for the SBC website, please note that they will need to be classified. Decide on the different categories which you can use. In addition, write

From your approved list, decide as a group which ones qualify as your top three sites. Share reasons why your group has come to the conclusion.

Process:

Evaluation:

Conclusion:

Community Blogging/Wiki

To add a community dimension to Webquests, you can use community blogs or even wikis.

Here is some useful information about the differences between blogs and wikis, and how wikis in particular "seem tailor-made for WebQuests."

Need a free wiki hosting site? Try Seedwiki or Bloki

Topics: Is downloading "free" Christian mp3 music legal?

Online Webquest Generators

Here are a couple of sites which allow you to generate your own webquests online. Some will create pages for you to save in your computer, some will actually host the webquest for you in their databases:

1. Webquest toolkit [Beta Version] of the Adult and Community Learning [ACL] resource site

2. teAchnology: the web portal for educators

3. http://www.aula21.net/Wqfacil/intro.htm

4. Internet4Classrooms

To help you with designing good webquests, here is a rubric to let you know what to look out for

Webquests for class experience (ii)

Webquests on the use of rubrics in educational evaluation

What are rubrics? (I'll get to the answer soon...)

In the meantime, here are some online articles from Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation: A peer-reviewed electronic journal which explain and discuss issues surrounding the use of rubrics in education:

Moskal, Barbara M. (2000). Scoring rubrics: what, when and how?. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(3). Retrieved April 8, 2005 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=3

Mertler, Craig A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(25). Retrieved April 8, 2005 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25

Moskal, Barbara M. (2003). Recommendations for developing classroom performance assessments and scoring rubrics. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 8(14). Retrieved April 8, 2005 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=8&n=14

Tierney, Robin & Marielle Simon (2004). What's still wrong with rubrics: focusing on the consistency of performance criteria across scale levels. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 9(2). Retrieved April 8, 2005 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=9&n=2

The urls below are links to rubrics generators:
RubiStar's Rubric Generator
RubiStar is a tool to help the teacher who wants to use rubrics but does not have the time to develop them from scratch.

While many teachers want to use rubrics or are experimenting with writing rubrics, they can be quite time-consuming to develop. RubiStar is a tool to help the teacher who wants to use rubrics but does not have the time to develop them from scratch. RubiStar provides generic rubrics that can simply be printed and used for many typical projects and research assignments. The unique thing about RubiStar, however, is that it provides these generic rubrics in a format that can be customized. The teacher can change almost all suggested text in the rubric to make it fit their own project.

teAchnology's General Rubric Generator

Chicago Public Schools' Rubric Bank
In The Rubric Bank, you will find a wide variety of performance assessment scoring rubrics. These rubrics are examples of scoring rubrics that have been used by schools, districts and state departments of education throughout the country.

LandMark Project's Rubric Builder: As teachers increasingly design online learning experiences for their students, evaluation of those activities remains a challenge. The Rubric Builder enables teachers to build effective assessment rubrics and to make them available over the World Wide Web.

Fairfax County Public Schools' Performance Assessment for Language Students (PALS)

Webquests for class experience (i)

Do a Webquest about the learning environment

There is much more to space and place than meets the eye. Winston Churchill is reported to have observed that “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Elaborating on this theme, a practising architect remarks that architecture:

is a social practice and as much cannot avoid being part of a complex network of power relationships. The fact that it impacts upon the production of . . . the built environment clearly indicates the political implications of aesthetic control. Space is neither innocent nor neutral: it is an instrument of the political; it has a performative aspect for whoever inhabits it; it works on its occupants. At the micro level, space prohibits, decides what may occur, lays down the law, implies a certain order, commands and locates bodies. (Pouler, cited in Scheer and Preiser, 1994, p. 175) 221-222

A. VISUAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT:

Schools and Colleges
• Boston College has a nice page which visually describes different types of classroom arrangements offered in the school. This can help provide some ideas about how to arrange furniture in an educational space.

• Huntington College likewise has a site which shows possible seating arrangements found in classrooms. The page which the link leads to illustrates 4 types of possible classroom arrangements and provides description and comments about the arrangements. There is some animation in the site which can be a little confusing. If you observe that the animator was trying to do, the intention is to transform arrangement one to arrangement two to arrangement three to arrangement four.

Hotels
• The Ramada Prince George has a great page which illustrate many different types of arrangement which can be configured for meetings.

• The Grove Hotel in Chandler's Cross, Hertfordshire uses a software calls Active Matrix to help you plan, visualize and even download your seating arrangement floor plan.

• Runnymeade Hotel likewise uses Active Matrix to help clients create 'to scale' diagrams of our meeting rooms in a variety of set ups.

Commercial furniture design companies
• A company called Smart Desks has a Classroom Design Archives Page which "contains typical classroom, training room, computer lab and conference room plans © SMARTdesks Design Studio. Feel free to use these designs for requisitions, grant proposals, etc."

Non-Profit Organizations
UNICEF has some nice information in their website, one of them relates to Centers of Learning, while the other relates to Arranging space in the classroom.

LITERATURE
Rodney Fulton has a great article entitled A Conceptual Model for Understanding the Physical Attributes of Learning Environments. This article proposes the SPATIAL model which is suppose to help educators maximize usage and design of the physical environment for learning purposes.

There is a chapter from Linda Shalaway's Learning to Teach...not just for beginners which provides some interesting information about Classroom Organization and the physical environment which is found in Scholastic Press's website. The site provides succinct information about arranging space, desk placement, environmental preferences, and designing classroom space.

Every object, color, texture, and spatial configuration, as well as their selection and placement, has educational significance. The designer of such spaces must, therefore, ask him or herself: "What educational implication does this or that design decision have for the occupant (learner or teacher)?" In order to do that, the designer must work closely with the educator to articulate what those goals for children are, and the educator must articulate more than square footage per child as the conceptual base for education.

Architecture Can Teach...and the lessons are rather fundamental by Anne Taylor, Robert A. Aldrich, and George Vlastos.


Learning Spaces: More than Meets the Eye by Malcolm B. Brown and Joan K. Lippincott http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0312.pdf

Here is a handout from a training session on classroom management

(Include all of Roger Hiemstra's stuff, http://www-distance.syr.edu/leindex.html, Cornell, etc on educational architecture - space is not innocent)

Webquests and the Learning Ecology

Given the reality of a larger ecosystem where learning does take place, we visit the question:
In what ways do Webquests incorporate the learning resources distributed in the larger ecosystem? (Note that the Webquest literature does not only confine learning resources to the web!)

How can they be attempts at learning which moves outside the small boxes (space time constraints) of your sunday school class? Your bible study class? Your development as a church leader?

My personal reflection:
In a certain way, Webquesting is an attempt to structure and direct learning using resources in the Web. Because it is structured, it allows for efficiency and curbs those unnecessary, fruitless searches. The trick is to set up a situation which lead you not just to collect resources, but to allow processing of these resources and their meaning. After all, we want to aim at deep learning, not just surface learning.

The learning ecology

What is the learning ecology?

Four articles stand out when considering the learning ecology.

The first is "Learning, Working & Playing in the Digital Age."The author of this article is John Seely Brown, the guy who (I think) first coined the term "learning ecology." Here we have a serious attempt to account for learning beyond our little boxes and to see space time connections in the real world.

The second article is "Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism". (Barry Wellman - very established in his field). This article is a description of the changing world which from little box communities, have been transformed into glocalized (globalized local) communities and now to digital point-to-point/peer-to-peer networked communities. Given these conditions and the existing mechanisms put in place already, it makes a case for expanding your ecology beyond just your small little worlds.

A third article on the learning ecology is "Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks Extending the classroom"
by George Siemens (2003). This is a short article and builds on the work of Brown

Siemen's article opens this way:

Opening summary
Learner-centered, lifelong learning has been the cry of knowledge society visionaries for the last decade. Yet learning continues to be delivered with teacher-centric tools in a twelve week format. Society is changing. Learners needs are changing. The course, as a model for learning, is being challenged by communities and networks, which are better able to attend to the varied characteristics of the learning process by using multiple approaches, orchestrated within a learning ecology.

Learner-centered, lifelong learning has been the cry of knowledge society visionaries for the last decade. Yet learning continues to be delivered with teacher-centric tools in a twelve week format. Society is changing. Learners needs are changing. The course, as a model for learning, is being challenged by communities and networks, which are better able to attend to the varied characteristics of the learning process by using multiple approaches, orchestrated within a learning ecology.

This is how he concludes:

Conclusion
Variety is a central requirement for learning. There are certainly times where formal, structured courses are required. Some times the knowledge requirements are such that the course model is best - if learning needs have a start and an end. In other cases, learning needs are complex...and difficult to anticipate. The more complex the learning needs, and the more quickly the field of knowledge evolves, the more valuable a learning community and network becomes.

The task of managers, administrators, and Instructors is to create the ecology, shape the communities, and release learners into this environment. Segments of the community can bring in other members (potential employers, graduates) allowing them to grow and learn with existing learners. Through the process, each learner is connected to a network allowing for life-long learning and the ability to care for their own learning needs in the future.

Finally, one short article which is critical for helping us understand educational options is "Blended learning: Let's get beyond the hype" (Margaret Driscoll) Driscoll provides different definitions of what blended learning could be and then concludes that the possible blends are many. That is good - that really extends our repertoire of strategies which we can apply for setting up teaching-learning processes.

(Note: I tested out that link and it is not accurate although it was the url I went to several months ago to get the article. Click here to get it. What does it say about the nature of the ecosystem?

Some final reflections:
1. Ask yourselves this question: Where is the information featured in this entry coming from from? Would it have been possible if the Internet is not a pervasive presence in our present world? Would be possible if the Internet is not already an irrevocable reality and an established, vital part of this learning ecology?

2. How does this idea of the learning ecology relate to the education of leaders of churches like you? Isn't it true that being the peculiar people of God who are holy, chosen, called, there is a call to conserve and preserve the values of the church rather than allow the larger ecosystem to "taint' it?

On the other hand, not being aware of, withdrawing yourselves from the larger ecosystem leads to institutional and personal self containment, isolation, disengagement from life issues, loss of credibility, the inability to be incarnational.

How does the learning ecology idea apply to the life long learning for the church/seminary?

Good site to visit

http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/w8-resources.html#sites

A webquest about webquests

This is a great site which teaches about Webquests using a webquest.Click here to get there

Webquest in Singapore

This is an entry from http://webquest.org/ which reports on the ICET 2004 conference held at NIE.

Web Quests

What is a Web Quest?

WebQuests are activities, using Internet resources, which encourage students to use higher order thinking skills. WebQuests are effectively higher order learning tools. - http://www.webquestdirect.com.au/whatis_awq.asp

The best way to find out is to explore the free workshop tutorial provided by Concept to Classroom. This site provides a truly comprehensive tutorial about the concept of Webquest and then moves on to demonstrate how it works, explore issues and support strategies, and key principles for implementing Webquests in classrooms.

OK, a bit of memory work here: There are six critical components which are found in Webquests:

1. Introduction
2. Task
3. Process
4. Resources (Key thoughts: Because resources are preselected by the teacher, students spend their time USING information, not LOOKING for it.
5. Evaluation and
6. Conclusion

Another site which provides brief summary of what webquests are and what their component parts comprise of is Kathy Shrock's Guide for Educators (Teacher Helpers: Slide Shows) . There is a slide show somewhere in the site about Webquests which is quite helpful.

Yet another site - a very excellent site - gives a great introduction of what Webquests are:
http://www.thematzats.com/webquests/page1.html
Of course, nothing beats the writings of the original designers of Webquests Bernie Dodge and Tom March. For articles about Webquests by them, go to Some Thoughts About WebQuests by Bernie Dodge. This is Dr. Bernie Dodge's original paper on WebQuests, which defines WebQuests and some of their characteristics. The other piece of literature is entitled WebQuests for Learning and is an introductory article about WebQuests written by Tom March, one of the first developers of WebQuests.