Teacher as Designer
When it comes to Instructional Design and Technology (IDT), I have always thought of myself as more having a focus on technology application in contrast to instructional design. Despite having created some major curriculum projects (textbooks), my self-definition comes mostly from my background as a cognitively-oriented, educational psychologist and the topics individuals tend to investigate and teach from this perspective. Of course, teachers have always planned and created "lessons", so maybe we tend to think of design when we create learning experiences to be used by others. So, are you a designer when you prepare lesson plans for a substitute?
When promoting structured instructional tactics such as webquests, we are moving more toward what I think of as design.
Assigned readings:
Pease, M. A., & Kuhn, D. (2011). This article describes two studies - the first compares PBL and lecture/discussion and the second concerns whether collaboration is necessary for effective PBL. The content is dense so I am only expecting you to read the Intro, First Study, and related portions of the Discussion. Because this study is offered as a positive example of PBL, understanding the differences in the experiences of the PBL and lecture/discussion students is important. For purposes of our discussion, we will consider how the PBL experiences of this approach might differ from other approaches to PBL.
Here is a presentation of a more positive take on digital projects.
Scaffolding student activities and WebQuests
Problem-based learning and WebQuests
Analysis Task 3
I believe that WebQuests were originally proposed as scaffolded problem-solving tasks and with popularity and a lack of commitment to the original goal morphed into something that was more general (topical, web-based lessons). Maybe I am wrong about the original intention, but I think I am correct in arguing that problem-based learning activities represent a subset of all WebQuests. I want you to locate WebQuests to support my position - one you think is a great problem-based learning activity and one you think would best be described as having some other purpose. Explain the rationale behind your selections.