The innovation mindset of Bernie Dodge

I was so impressed with web education pioneer, Bernie Dodge tonight. Let me tell you why:

Instead of sitting on his innovative Webquest, he is pressing ahead taking it to a new level.

Tonight he shared the following with us, the show will be posted over at edtechtalk.com this week — or you should subscribe to the womenofweb2 podcast.

Three of the most innovative ideas for webquests

1. He talked about how a static Web 1.0 webquest on immigration was taking into Second Life with a test group of adults with amazing results.
2. He talked about how he is already toying with creating a widget to allow searching of webquests from the new iphone, which he is waiting to get.
3. He talked about how webquests are platform independent and he expects the major growth of webquests to occur in the video format with the creation of videos and posting them to sites like youtube.

At the beginning of the show, he expressed his frustration with how many just throw links on a page and call them a webquest. But that a true webquest has a core task that requires higher level thinking skills and could be on a wiki or blog or video or any medium.

I'll tell you that the first time I heard about webquests, I believe the person who taught me had it wrong. It is not about hyperlinks, it is about teaching.

It is about a task and grappling with issues and thinking for goodness sakes. In some ways, I think Horizon and Flat Classroom were webquests on a massive scale as students sought to define and explain the trends that are changing our world via wiki and video.

Some webquests I've seen are like Internet scavenger hunts, that is not a webquest at all. It was a great show, I'm going to relisten to that one!

tag: Bernie Dodge, webquest, WOW2, edtechtalk, education, teaching