tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55092102008-04-24T18:23:06.264-07:00Bernie DodgeBlogger51125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-71214796341969370142008-04-24T17:58:00.000-07:002008-04-24T18:23:06.394-07:00

Though things have been quiet here on the WebQuest News site, there's lots going on behind the scenes. Some major improvements in QuestGarden are being beta tested right now with more to follow soon. Conceptually, though, the most interesting development is a redesign of the taskonomy. I'm thinking of it more broadly as a taxonomy of authentic constructivist learning tasks and as a list that can

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-3512844309933840212007-11-18T13:21:00.001-08:002007-11-18T14:28:10.001-08:00

The National Council for the Social Studies is holding its annual conference here in San Diego for the first time. It's likely that there will be many WebQuest aficionados among the 4000 expected to attend. Would you like to get together for an impromptu birds of a feather session? Drop me a line at bdodge@mail.sdsu.edu and put NCSS in the subject line. We'll see what kind of merriment we can

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-36363584595316774422007-09-07T12:09:00.000-07:002007-09-07T12:25:08.692-07:00

At the international conference of MERLOT in New Orleans last month, QuestGarden was the recipient of the Teacher Education Classics Award, an honor that the WebQuest Portal received in 2003. MERLOT is a searchable collection of peer reviewed, higher education, online learning materials created by registered members, and a set of faculty development support services. MERLOT's vision is to be a

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-11114815622408946102007-06-28T09:58:00.000-07:002007-06-28T10:08:40.915-07:00

About 45 WebQuest fans gathered for a Birds of a Feather session at NECC in Atlanta, Monday. Cara Hagen and Scott Schwister blogged the conversation which ranged from "bring back the matrix" to ideas for improving the site. Questions covered the gamut. How can you make a good WebQuest for primary students? What do you think about kids creating WebQuests? How will WebQuests incorporate Web 2.0

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-17328234288158509912007-06-22T11:42:00.000-07:002007-06-22T11:55:54.934-07:00

The original WebQuest site at SDSU and the portal at WebQuest.org have been falling into disrepair lately. Things were hard to find, links were going bad, and the whole site had a turn of the century look to it. All that is changed as of today. Please come visit the new unified interface for WebQuest.org. There are new sections on articles and research about WebQuests, a section on WebQuest

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-72839380280441624972007-04-05T10:47:00.000-07:002007-04-05T10:54:31.184-07:00

Jamie McKenzie puts nicely something I've been wanting to write about for some time. In the February issue of From Now On his topic is Putting an End to Topical Research. You know the kind of assignment: write a three-page report on Guatemala. For two decades now schools have been seduced into buying lots of equipment so that students can become smarter. Sadly, we have no convincing evidence

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-80993838856961614322007-03-19T15:33:00.000-07:002007-03-19T15:49:13.073-07:00

I'm wrapping up a jam-packed 5 days in Hong Kong today. I was invited by Lee Fong-Lok, director of CAITE, the Centre for the Advancement of Information Technology in Education, to keynote an award ceremony. Award for what? It was the first WebQuest competition that I'm aware of. It was a lot of fun watching the excitement of the teachers who won, especially the presentations made by the girls who

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-69698999431007834122007-03-09T08:34:00.000-08:002007-03-09T08:43:00.662-08:00

Here's something new that looks very promising. I'll look for a place on QuestGarden to link to this to encourage the sharing of completed WebQuests. "Welcome to a worldwide learning network OER Commons is a teaching and learning network of shared materials, from K through college, from algebra to zoology, open to all to use. Open Educational Resources, or OER, offer new ways to engage with

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-70046189651908832352007-02-23T23:11:00.000-08:002007-02-23T23:41:40.336-08:00

Yesterday was terrific. Twenty-four of the teachers I worked with in WebQuest's Jurassic Era came back together to learn about QuestGarden. They were part of the Triton and Patterns Projects, two Challenge Grants that stretched from 1995 to 2001, years packed with workshops, showcases, and a whole lot of evolution of the WebQuest model. Marcie Bober, the project evaluator, counted up the impact

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-62794087767870431592007-02-19T10:11:00.000-08:002007-02-19T10:27:39.595-08:00

There's snow on the ground in many places, so what better time to think about summer? This year for the first time since 2001, I'm returning to the Thacher School in Ojai for a week-long advanced WebQuest workshop. Ask anyone who's been there for a summer session and they'll tell you about the food, the beautiful mountain sunsets, and the sheer pleasure of being productive away from all

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-27751745702639065912006-12-31T21:02:00.000-08:002007-01-06T17:26:14.876-08:00

As the minutes tick down on 2006, the entire WebQuest staff (Bernie, June and Alex) are hard at work getting the new QuestGarden site in order. To distinguish it from this site, webquest.org, we'll be giving it a new look here and there. Part of that will be a logo that captures the idea of QuestGarden, a place to grow great WebQuests. We've got a few samples to show and would love to gather

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-24821808474038841622006-12-17T13:17:00.000-08:002006-12-17T13:41:43.932-08:00

No... not for good, but for better! From December 24, 2006 to January 2, 2007, QuestGarden will be unavailable. We need the time to do a major overhaul and the addition of new features. During this shutdown we'll be moving all published WebQuests created in QuestGarden to a new site and the structure of the URLs will change. Subject to revision, here is how it will go: If your old WebQuest was

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1164245979251226192006-11-22T17:04:00.000-08:002006-12-10T16:59:24.650-08:00

There are some great new features to announce this Thanksgiving Eve. First and bestest: you can now export your WebQuest to a zipped archive and take it with you. This will be great for education students whose professors want them to turn in something heftier than a mere URL. It's also, more broadly, a good capability for any web-based service to have. Would you do significant work on a site

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1157167564614899472006-09-01T20:08:00.000-07:002006-11-13T16:55:07.080-08:00

A year ago today I flipped the switch and opened up QuestGarden to anyone who wanted to try it out. Like the WebQuest idea itself, QuestGarden has taken off beyond my wildest expectations. We have 34356 registered users in 120 countries and more than 19000 WebQuests have been created. For the last year I've been paying for server space and bandwidth out of pocket and doing all the work of

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1152892902469199362006-07-14T16:00:00.000-07:002006-09-19T09:51:51.570-07:00

NECC 2006 filled San Diego with close to 17,000 excited educators last week and WebQuests, as usual, were part of the conversation. This is a shot of Annie Rae Clementz at her presentation WebQuests: A Mechanism for Adapting Technology Professional Development. The binder she's holding is part of a very creative staff development camp she and Lynn Burdick designed in WebQuest format. It's called

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1143339222405195562006-03-25T18:03:00.000-08:002006-12-01T07:14:24.070-08:00

Log in and give it a whack! No doubt there will be new little quirks that turn up in the new environment, but it seems to be basically back in business... only faster. Again, I sincerely apologize for the disruptions the move caused. The complications (as usual) were completely unanticipated and I had to learn a lot of new Linux and php lore in order to get us back on the air. The new server

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1143223118362813562006-03-24T09:48:00.000-08:002006-03-24T20:13:28.900-08:00

My sincere apologies to all those anxiously awaiting the return of QuestGarden. It's almost ready to roll except for two things: the ability to edit the appearance still isn't working and pictures aren't uploading properly. Both of these things are due to the fact that some php settings on the new server are different than on the old site, and I'm still working to fix the scripts that broke. If

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1142828006973450882006-03-19T20:10:00.000-08:002006-09-13T10:16:04.700-07:00

An unforeseen complication is delaying the completion of our move to a new server. It will certainly not be up tonight. Monday would be good but Tuesday seems more likely. Thanks for your patience. UPDATE: We're almost there. Some permissions problems on files need to be fixed. Hoping for a Thursday night re-opening.

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1141750095523115552006-03-07T08:39:00.000-08:002006-10-25T10:26:55.766-07:00

No... no need to change your bookmarks. The URL for the WebQuest Portal and QuestGarden will remain the same but the actual server they sit on is moving to a powerful new home. We've outgrown the shared server we've been on since 2002. The symptoms of that are that twice in the last two weeks, our web host has shut off access to the site because too many requests to the database were flooding in

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1139002136642799782006-02-03T13:28:00.000-08:002006-10-05T06:46:29.353-07:00

Congratulations go to Eric Chamberlin whose WebQuest Is Latin Really Dead? impressed members of the Boothbay-Boothbay Harbor Consolidated School District, according to this report. Great to see a WebQuest used as evidence to get more support for doing the right things!

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1136402479167619842006-01-04T11:21:00.000-08:002006-12-13T10:19:40.216-08:00

I guess WebQuests have truly arrived in the mainstream. There's a lot of buzz around the web about the new DaVinci Code Web Quest which is part of a viral marketing campaign to promote the movie coming out next May and to sell a few more copies of the book to the handful who don't already have it (mostly cavedwellers in Borneo). The quest is a series of puzzles to solve that start out easy and

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1132182810253576432005-11-16T14:46:00.000-08:002006-11-22T20:54:01.060-08:00

I keep track of mentions of the word WebQuest using Technorati, which tracks the travails of pre-service teachers creating WebQuests in a required class, and occasionally the wails of high school kids who were assigned a WebQuest. I learn a lot from reading these unedited accounts. Increasingly there are blogs in Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese that mention WebQuests, too, and today I noticed

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1130513893250181042005-10-28T08:38:00.000-07:002006-11-22T08:01:26.093-08:00

Has there ever been a conference devoted exclusively to WebQuests? I don't think so, but soon, there will be. The amazingly productive Comunitat Catalana de WebQuest is organizing a two-day meeting next March in Barcelona. I've met the organizers and presenters and I'm sure it's going to be a tremendous event. If you're fluent in Spanish or Catalan, put it on your calendar! Congratulations, Carme

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1129440169859716892005-10-15T21:33:00.000-07:002006-07-31T17:07:32.040-07:00

This post represents the first edition of a regular feature here. Around the middle of every month, I'll link to new WebQuests that have caught my eye. In future editions, they may well come from all over, but this time I'm going to restrict the list to lessons that have been grown in the QuestGarden. They're not all perfect and maybe not even finished yet, but they all had something interesting

Bernie Dodgetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5509210.post-1127425886127228152005-09-22T13:56:00.000-07:002005-09-22T21:22:38.896-07:00

It's just 21 days ago that I flipped the switch and opened up QuestGarden to the public, so here's a status report for anyone interested. The picture of recent logins tells the tale. In the last 48 hours we've had 213 members log in. There are 2,443 users and they come from 59 different countries. Here are the top 10: CountryCountUS1906Canada135Australia82Brazil66China (including Hong Kong)

Bernie Dodge