The drop-in session on Friday seemed to go well ... and things seem to be coming together for most people. There are an interestingly large proportion of students this semester who have decided to learn & use Dreamweaver or the geocities website building tools rather than going down the Questgarden path - for which I am grateful. After my experience last semester with trying to explain how to get their webquest pages complete with all their images, animations etc saved down to their local university server, it will be a relief not to have to hassle too much with this. It is such a tedious process.
I may have had some influence on these decisions :-)
This whole process also reminds me that I probably need to make up a basic worksheet explaining how the directory structure works on computers, how local machines link to servers and how the web and the internet mediate this structure. For people who have grown up only knowing and using the web, & using the xp/2000+ versions of Windows, I guess the whole directory and tree structure is less than transparent.
This may be a task for next semester.
We are grappling at the moment with the complexities of embedded features in web pages, the need to have an index.html file at the top level and the necessity of having all the files associated with a single site located in a single folder in the same directory, on the local server ... as well, of course, as the structure of webquests, the importance of having a task that requires their students to change or transform the information they find on websites in some way (to avoid plagiarism in addition to the good pedagogical reasons), the evaluation rubrics and the rationale on the teacher's page.
Because of my need to grade the webquests, this latter is now serving 3 purposes: 1. to provide me with the information I need to be able to grade the webquests from a pedagogical perspective (reflections & rationale); 2. to give other teachers & classmates enough information about the objectives of the webquests & what students they are designed for - so they can decide whether these would be useable for them; and 3. for more thoughtful students to use to understand better the purpose of the webquests and what students might learn through doing them.
posted by dlh_downunder @ 10:16 AM
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