On a Quest

Dear treasure hunters,

This week's assignment and discussions did not only make me focus on the present state of my own teaching practice and the very near future – the following two weeks is when the implementation of our tech-based ideas is due – but also, at least for a second, made me think of the treasure hunts of the past. Pen-and-paper ones, of course, with a question sheet in one hand, getting to know my own town, and later on, the capital. Later, there would be poster exhibitions in the language school lobby where I used to work – I remember the 'Wordplay' expo provided by the British Council. Our native speaker colleague compiled a quiz even some of us teachers found hard to complete by searching the posters, as some of the questions required drawing linguistic or logical conclusions from several posters. Then there were treasure hunts for my teenage students on a summer course in Oxford – some questions related to Egyptian cat statues in the Ashmolean Museum, others to prices of bus fare for senior citizens. One thing they all have in common is: they all took place before the Internet era and, as far as I remember, there was an element of fun and discovery that the participants enjoyed.

How do the WebQuests of the present differ from their predecessors? Until this week I associated web-based treasure hunts with virtual tours around galleries, colleges, sights. So imagine the surprise when I encountered all the amazing projects submitted by fellow teachers in different languages and a dozen different subject areas at Zunal. There are so many different ways in which the knowledge in each of them is first collected and then processed into something inherently new and, ideally, applicable to real world.

Are our students ready for such tasks? Are the teachers ready too – not only to create their own WebQuest but also conduct them, even the ready-made ones? This is the question I have been considering – it probably takes getting used to. I sent a link to the Kabuki lesson to one my students who is an avid fan of Japan and he loved it, said he would do all the steps. Like all the new activities (web-based quests will be relatively novel in my educational environment), it is good to prepare students for this new way of thinking and relating facts and ideas.

What I occasionally do with my ICT students to make them think 'outside of the box' is make them write answers to 'Find the connection between ...' questions. Sometimes they assume they are trickster questions but when they give it a try, they come up with amazing (and diverse) answers. The questions include: 'What is the connection between climbing Mt Fuji and a job interview?' or 'Find the connection between Africa and open source'. (If you want to know what my original answers are, I would be delighted to tell you). I was inspired for this exercise by M.J.Gelb's book How to think like Leonardo da Vinci.

There is a ludic element to learning that we should not neglect and that does not disappear with technology. On the contrary. That, along with excitement and discovery can result in motivation mobilizing all the knowledge that would otherwise remain compartmentalized. I am sure that the wonderful ideas my colleagues have so far shared for their much-more-than-language-learning projects and WebQuests would / will be embraced by students. I will try to transfer the element of curiosity, collaboration and transformation of knowledge into my technology-enhanced project too, although it does not specifically include a WebQuest.

By the way, I see myself at the beginning of each week on the course as starting a new quest – we each try to find our own way through readings that direct us, the myriad of links and websites, draw conclusions and relate to each other, come up with our findings and present them – don't you feel it is a kind of a WebQuest as well?

Thank you for accompanying me on our road to discovery.

Warm regards from snowy Croatia * * *,

Andreja