Week 10

This week, I learned that the essence of a Webquest is to provide the learners with the means to complete given tasks.

I feel that it is very important to understand what Webquest exactly is (especially when we are required to design a Webquest), so I shall try my best to convey what I have gathered thus far from the lecture. Webquest does not follow the concept of a spoon-fed procedure which detailedly lists out all the steps to the completion of tasks, neither is it a form of web-based lesson. It is more like a instruction that is also equipped with resources and support to help learners to complete given tasks. As learners complete each step of a task, a good Webquest designer may want to consolidate that step first (i.e. refreshing relevant concepts) before proceeding to the next.

All in all, I think that Webquest definitely has potential as an effective instructional tool in the future. This is because we are living in the information Age and the Webquest has the capability to gather information efficiently for its users. Webquest also supports the learning theory of Socioculturalism, which employs resources and support for the given tasks (in line with Oliver and Herrington's structure of learning design). Moreover, Socioculturalism is something that I have identified in Week 2, Assignment 2's blog entry as a "universal" learning theory (it can be applied to most problems, regardless of its effectiveness), hence Webquest is indeed an instructional tool that has wide-ranging applications and high potential for further development and use.

However, Webquest still has a long way to go before its use can be widely applied. There are still instances where classroom lessons are more effective than e-learning. For example, a cooking class, where all the human's five senses can be made use of (i.e. to smell food, to taste food, and to feel the temperature and texture of food). Currently, a computer multimedia plaform can only overcome a couple of barriers to senses, namely sight and hearing. Perhaps as we continue to discover the potential of e-learning, we should first blend it with classroom lesson before venturing into a pure e-learning class.

I am glad that through the Webquest project, I have value-added myself IT-wise. I seem to have become more IT-savvy (wow never will I attach this term to myself because I'm very much still at the era of MS Word and paint program, if you get what I mean) because I can now execute more IT applications such as the exe program and Zoho programs, all thanks to this project.