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Webquests: Utilizing Technology in a Constructivist Manner to Facilitate Meaningful Preservice Learning
Rina Kundu,Christina Bain.Art Education.Reston:Mar 2006.Vol.59,Iss.2;pg.6,6pgs
Subjects: / Colleges & universities,Learning,Teacher education,College students,Information literacy,Problem solving,Field trips,Research,Art education
Author(s): / Rina Kundu,Christina Bain
Document types: / Commentary
Publication title: / Art Education.Reston:Mar 2006.Vol.59,Iss. 2;pg.6,6pgs
Source type: / Periodical
ISSN/ISBN: / 00043125
ProQuest document ID: / 999545131
Text Word Count / 3497
Document URL: / http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=999545131&Fmt=4&clientId= 14907&RQT=309&VName=PQD
Abstract (Document Summary)
Teachers can design webquests to eliminate some of the traditional obstacles to art-based learning, expanding the types of inquiry that can be undertaken in classes and enabling students to master materials through problem solving and critical thinking. The purpose of this article is to elucidate the nature of webquests, explain how and why our program utilizes them in preservice art teacher education, and provide information on how classroom practice can engage students actively in facilitating meaning making. 1 Before producing a webquest, students have engaged with a number of issues in relationship to teaching and learning with technology, including information literacy, the ability to identify, locate, evaluate, and use information for a problem at hand.
Full Text(3497 words)
Copyright National Art Education Association Mar 2006
Teachers tend to emulate the teaching styles or methods they were exposed to both as students and as preservice educators (Carter & Sottile, 2002; Johnson, 1991). One of the more challenging aspects of teaching preservice students at the university level is not only providing these students with the most current pedagogical theories, but also demonstrating how these various theories translate into actual practice in the art classroom.
While traditional forms of teaching, such as lecturing, certainly enable an instructor to disseminate a body of knowledge fairly quickly and efficiently, they do not necessarily engage students most effectively or authentically in the learning process. Current educational theory (Hanson, 2002; Manery, 2003; Wilkinson, McNutt, & Friedman, 2003) holds that meaningful learning requires learners to interact with new information in ways that enable active inquiry. Students should have opportunities to construct their own knowledge and to develop their own cognitive maps, connecting concepts with meaning making. As students actively engage with learning, they can move to higher levels of cognition that involve applying, synthesizing, and evaluating knowledge.
Teachers can design webquests to eliminate some of the traditional obstacles to art-based learning, expanding the types of inquiry that can be undertaken in classes and enabling students to master materials through problem solving and critical thinking. As teachers and researchers, we are interested in examining how webquests can nurture authentic forms of student learning. The purpose of this article is to elucidate the nature of webquests, explain how and why our program utilizes them in preservice art teacher education, and provide information on how classroom practice can engage students actively in facilitating meaning making.
Passive Learning
Most art teachers have experienced at least one art history course, fondly remembered as "art in the dark," during their college coursework. For decades, this single teaching methodology, a slide-illustrated lecture, has dominated the teaching of art history at the university. The methodology often encourages rote memorization and passive learning among students. Students are moved along with the use of slides and the format fosters little sense of participation or exploration. Looking at images presented through reproductions where art and artifacts are situated out of context collapses differences between art forms.
This particular methodology of teaching then gets practiced within secondary schools. Art educators often use slides and transmit information to students, discussing artists' intent and formal qualities of images and artifacts. The social life of things, that is how people use art and artifacts, disappears. At best, they explore exercises that require them to know the conditions that mediate the use of various principles, including conducting a visual analysis and comparing and contrasting objects, and little is done in examining objects within contexts and finding interrelationships between objects and cultures.
Internet resources, however, can connect art to its social practices. Students can talk to people in communities beyond their own environments to discover alternative ways of knowing. Through virtual field trips they can look at objects within contexts and see how they are used. Such field trips can be an important educational tool for facilitating a spatial understanding versus a linear understanding of objects. Webquests using Internet resources enable the production of knowledge through inquiry. Furthermore, webquests change instruction and involve students in the social practices of art. The instructor works as "a guide on the side" instead of the authority figure standing in front of the classroom.
What is a Webquest?
First, let us clear up some possible misconceptions regarding the nature of webquests. Although they exist in an on-line environment, they are quite distinct from other forms of educational technology. For example, PowerPoint(TM) presentations are teacher-centered and mainly linear in direction; on-line treasure hunts require filling out an answer sheet or finding the "right" answer; and surfing the web may not have an educational purpose. Although students often find solving webquests to be fun, unlike on-line games, their purpose is neither for competition or entertainment. Furthermore, although students access on-line resources, they are directed to a selection of specific resources that will enable them to use their time wisely and efficiently.
To be more specific, webquests are online, interactive modules that allow students to be involved in inquiry-oriented learning. A webquest can be thought of as a microworld, where students explore an issue in a learning environment that is both cooperative and contextual. Through an in-depth examination of web-based resources, students gather and synthesize information in collaboration with their peers to solve a problem. While, as a group, students who undertake a webquest interact and work together, each group member carries out a specific, meaningful role. Webquest roles could include such varied jobs as art historian, sociologist, anthropologist, and archeologist. Each role enables students to carry out their research from a particular perspective. Group members then pool their respective research findings, bring their newly acquired knowledge to bear on an issue, formulate a response to a complex, open-ended problem, and propose a reflective and critical solution. Unlike traditional learning activities, there can be multiple solutions to the problem in a webquest.
Because the work of a webquest involves cooperative and collaborative learning, the negotiation of authentic resources, the active application of researched knowledge, and the construction of a solution to an open-ended problem, it is a constructivist effort. Therefore, this type of learning is quite different from learning with PowerPoint(TM) or web treasure hunts. Although PowerPoint(TM) and web treasure hunts integrate technology into the classroom and enable students to work actively, they reinforce traditional methods of teaching and learning-transmitting and memorizing information, and identifying and recalling specifics in isolation from a context.
Understanding, however, involves the meaningful application of facts, information, and knowledge within a context. Complexity, diverse viewpoints, and critical insights characterize understanding-all of which are enabled through problems proposed within a webquest.
History and Structure of Webquests
The history of the webquest is relatively short. Bernie Dodge and Tom March developed the original concept in 1995 at San Diego State University. According to Dodge (1997) a webquest is "an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing" (p. 1). Dodge (1997) delineates two different types of webquests: short-term and long-term. The more commonly practiced short-term webquest can be completed in one to three class periods and focuses on the acquisition and synthesis of knowledge. The long-term webquest requires students to spend one week to one month on the problem and allows learners to demonstrate an understanding of the material by creating a product, either on-line or off-line. TheWebQuest Page (Dodge, 1998), located at http://webquest.sdsu.edu/, receives more than 1,700 hits a day and is proof that educational interest concerning webquests is growing.
Typically, webquests contain several of the same components. Dodge (1997) contends that webquests should include the following: an introduction, a task, information sources, a process, some guidance, and a conclusion.
1. An introduction that sets the stage and provides some background information.
2. A task that is doable and interesting.
3. A set of information sources needed to complete the task. Many (though not necessarily all) of the resources are embedded in the Webquest document itself as anchors pointing to information on the World Wide Web. Information sources might include web documents, experts available via e-mail or real-time conferencing, searchable databases on the Internet, and books and other documents physically available in the learner's setting. Because pointers to resources are included, the learner is not left to wander through webspace completely adrift.
4. A description of the process the learners should go through in accomplishing the task. The process should be broken out into clearly described steps.
5. Some guidance on how to organize the information acquired. This can take the form of guiding questions, or directions to complete organizational frameworks such as time-lines, concept maps, or cause-and-effect diagrams.
6. A conclusion that brings closure to the quest, reminds the learners about what they've learned, and perhaps encourages them to extend the experience into other domains (Dodge, 1997, p.1).
Dodge (2001), in collaboration with the San Diego City Schools Education Technology Department, further advocates the inclusion of a teacher page which would contain information regarding standards, targeted learners, and suggestions for teaching the unit. Although not every webquest includes the exact same components, they indeed have a similar structure.
How and Why Does Our Program Integrate Webquests into Preservice Learning?
At the University of North Texas (UNT), our program requires art education preservice students to complete two technology courses:ART 3170: Computers in Art and ART 4830:Technology in the Visual Arts.The first course focuses on the production of art on the computer, while the latter focuses on how technology has changed the nature of teaching and learning. Our students examine webquests' in the second course and work together as teams to design one. Usually, students take about 3 to 4 weeks to collaboratively construct the webquest, using a web editor such as Dreamweaver(TM) or Composer(TM). The students include an introduction, a task, a process, an evaluation rubric, and a conclusion in their webquests. The process section includes roles for participants to play, Internet resources to be used to conduct the research, and questions to focus the participants' attention.
We have several teaching goals in mind when we present the webquest project.
1. We wish to motivate our students to create lessons that speak to the complexity of art-based learning. Lessons should not be obsessed with learning art skills but must speak to how art enables the production of knowledge in relationship to living in society.
2. We want students to understand how to integrate technology into art-based learning and how technology can enhance learning and create different types of learning opportunities. What are the pros and cons of constructivist learning? Or with using technology in a constructivist manner? What are some of the problems students will face in assessing learning that is supported by technology?
3. We want our students to understand how to address the needs of diverse learners through technology. We want our preservice students to design specific cognitive activities that allow students to produce knowledge from different perspectives and that utilixe different ways of learning. Activities should be meaningful to not only to preservice teachers but also their future students, relating back to their worklviews.
4. We wish to enable preservice students to develop their thinking skills. As future art educators, this is essential. One of our preservice students criticized this project because she was given "too many options" (personal communication, April, 2004). Teaching art, however, requires choices, and it is up to our students to make the best choices for themselves and encourage their future students to do the same.
5. We want our students to learn how to negotiate working collaboratively. As art teachers they will be part of a school-a team-and it is important for them to practice interpersonal skills.
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Figure 1. Introduction page for webquest The Monument Makers by students Andrea Asburn, Catherine Cave, Bill Close, Rebecca Crake, and Kara Shotwell, 2004.
An Example of a Webquest Designed by Preservice Students
Although our preservice students have designed many innovative webquests, here we describe one entitled The Monument Makers (see Figure 1). Designed for teams of high school students, this webquest begins with a particular scenario: A freak tidal wave has damaged the Statue of Liberty beyond repair and there is a need for a new public monument. The webquest then challenges students to create a proposal for a new public monument for New York City in response to a competition held by the city to replace the well-known statue. The monument must speak to New York City's past, present, and future, as well as the nation at large. Participants take on different roles such as art historian, sociologist, project director, and site organizer to study the history of the monument building, particularly that of the Statue of Liberty, the values of the communities existing at the site, fundraising initiatives to build the monument, the environmental conditions of the site, and the materials needed to construct the monument. Although students carry out different research tasks, they must pool their knowledge in order to create the proposal. Their final proposal must include a PowerPoint(TM) presentation and a design plan that includes two-dimensional sketches and a three-dimensional model. The proposals are then presented to an audience who decides which of the projects would be most valuable and most viable.
What Do We Want to Teach Our Students Using Constructivist Methods?
Among the cognitive learning theories available, constructivism and situated learning are most significant to creating an active art classroom. Constructivism promotes the idea that learners construct knowledge. As von Glaserfeld (1996) explains, what sets constructivism apart from other learning theories is its epistemology; in other words, knowledge is not a collection of facts but a mapping of actions and operations that become viable to a learner's experience. Learning thus becomes an activity that students must carry out. According to Fosnot (1996), constructivism includes such characteristics as challenging, open-ended investigations in realistic, meaningful contexts, allowing students to generate their own hypotheses and models as possibilities. We want our preservice students to facilitate a classroom atmosphere where their students engage in activity and reflection, as they communicate and defend their ideas. Such an understanding of constructivism is used to create webquests and the assessment tasks contained within them. In developing their webquests, preservice students construct a problem that enables multiple solutions and allows students to present these to an audience, such as their classmates, for feedback and evaluation.