Royce Kimmons, Dan Gregory, Tom Benton, Jason Ford, and Anna Lauzon
December 10, 2008
CSCL 2008
Revisiting Vietnam WebQuest Report
TOPIC
Although each member of our team works in a different area of higher education, everyone in our group is interested in history. As we were trying to narrow the topic, we discussed how the Iraq War has been compared to the Vietnam War. The idea for our WebQuest developed from the notion that we can learn from previous conflicts and that many administrations look back to the past to address the present.
TARGET AUDIENCE
This WebQuest was developed for students in higher education, but it may be adapted for secondary-level students.
GOALS & OBJECTIVES
The goal was for students to understand that by studying historical events in context, they can develop analytic skills that can be applied in future situations.
Our objectives were for students to critically examine the context of the Vietnam War and to learn lessons from history. After completing this WebQuest, students should be able to explain historical and political contexts surrounding the Vietnam War, recognize how U.S. military strategy, politics, public opinion, and personal choices shaped the war, understand key figures and events of the war, and recognize costs and consequences of the war for both the military and citizenry. To complete the task, students must use critical thinking skills to evaluate the U.S.'s role in the Vietnam War within the historical and political context of the targeted era and apply their synthesized insights to a fictitious conflict.
TASK
Students work in five-person teams. Each team member takes on the role of a presidential advisor and analyzes both the failures and successes associated with the U.S.'s approach to the war in Vietnam from the perspective of that advisor. The team members individually investigate the key figures, the military strategy, the draft, the sacrifices demanded of civilians and the military, and the cost of the Vietnam War and share their interpretations of events with their team members. Working together, each team develops recommendations to the president about how to approach a fictitious political conflict in Restonia based on lessons learned from Vietnam. The team presents these recommendations in a 6-10 minute video presentation for the president and posts the video online.
WEBQUEST ORGANIZATION & OVERVIEW
The WebQuest builds on students’ pre-existing knowledge and skills as developed in history and social studies curricula, with this project asking them to take their synthesis skills and develop them further.
The linear organization of the Remembering Vietnam WebQuest was designed for maximum engagement and minimal information overload. Information is parsed out in just-in-time fashion, ideally addressing questions just as they are asked. The Overview provides a short description of the WebQuest for students as well as teachers and touches on the role-playing activity and the organization of the task. The multimedia Introduction is highly engaging and provides more details about the students’ roles as advisors.
The Task section plainly explains the assignment, and the Process page breaks down the steps in detail. The Choose Your Role page provides details about the presidential advisor roles that will be taken on by students. Students are also directed to the Background and Resources pages for information about the Vietnam conflict and the president’s current concerns in Restonia. The Conclusion page asks students to carefully consider how their final project addresses the objectives of the WebQuest. It also suggests ways in which the final products and an analysis of the process can be incorporated into class discussion or debate.
The Teacher page was included to help teachers decide if this WebQuest is appropriate for their class and to help them implement the WebQuest. This section explains the WebQuest’s objectives and goals, indicates the target audience, and provides information about how much time should be planned for implementing the WebQuest.
RESEARCH & RESOURCES
To complete the WebQuest tasks, students must research the events and the context of the Vietnam War; on the Resources page, we provided links to various online resources they might find useful. In choosing the electronic resources for our WebQuest we kept two main factors in mind.
First, we wanted to use resources that were visually appealing. Web pages full of unorganized text were quickly dismissed in favor of sites that were clean and organized and that used other visual products like pictures, videos, and animation.
Second, it was important to use academically credible resources. While it was difficult in a period of nine days to extensively fact-check all of our online resources, we generally stuck to sites with clear ties to government, academic, and historical organizations.
We tried to represent many perspectives on the war in order to avoid providing students with resources biased toward one opinion or another. With as emotionally divisive a topic as the Vietnam War, there are countless resources on the web that are heavily slanted. While it was important not to ignore these opinions, we did not want one opinion to dominate our WebQuest. We wanted students to examine all sides and come to their own conclusions. We also directed students to a varety of off-line resources, including seminal films and books about the Vietnam era.
In addition to resources pertaining to the Vietnam War, our WebQuest included other resources targeted to help them create the final product. Through the WebQuest, users are provided resources that describe how to create videos and podcasts as well as how to post them to YouTube.
PROCEDURES & PROCESSES
Using a situation-based approach to the assignment, our team wanted to place the students into an actual scenario that required them to role-play, research, and synthesize information based on those roles, collaborate with other team members, and then make a unified decision on a course of action to take. The goal was not just to learn about history, it was to have students learn from it in order to make informed decisions for the future.
To help make this particular assignment meaningful and important to the student, we chose to have the students role-play as the president's most trusted advisors. Those roles were chosen based on the different lenses they offered in looking at the foreign and domestic turbulence of the Vietnam era.
Once students select their roles, they then begin to research the Vietnam War with an eye towards the five areas of investigation outlined earlier. The goal is for them to compare the current situation in the fictitious state, Restonia, with that of Vietnam and to have them decide on a course of action that hopefully will not repeat the mistakes of history. This is not to say that that the only solution is to avoid war. The problem is open-ended with no single answer. Students are free to come to their own collaborative conclusion and advise accordingly, as long it is supported by the facts, researched, and synthesized.
Because the students are the president's most trusted advisors, it was important for their decision to be collaborative. We did not want this to be just a cooperative project with each only doing one part of the task; we wanted students to share their information, learn from each other, and critically think through this problem together. The ability to problem solve collaboratively is a necessary skill for the twenty-first century workforce.
Finally, it was decided that, in addition to being a useful exercise in media production, the creation of a video podcast, uploaded to YouTube or another media-sharing site, would allow students to finish out the role as advisors by publicly disclosing their advice. Using video, students would have the option of including images, archived video footage, and audio as they gave their advice, based on facts presented, to the President. With the knowledge that their video has the potential of being seeing by hundreds and even thousands of viewers, it was believed that students would take an extra amount of care in putting together their presentation.
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING TOOLS
One very well-orchestrated portion of our WebQuest was the implementation of roles as a collaborative learning tool. Unlike many other WebQuests which assign roles based on segmented procedural tasks (reporter reports, leader manages, researcher researches, etc.), we assigned roles based on perspectives and expected all members to go through the same process of researching, analyzing, and reporting from his or her own role's perspective (that of a military, educational, historical, press, and political advisor). This made for a completely fair and balanced approach to separating the workload (up until the actual recording of the WebQuest) and created a collaborative, rather than cooperative, environment. To illustrate, while other WebQuests might give Task 1 to Student A, Task 2 to Student B, Task 3 to Student C, and so on, we gave every task (1-3) to each student (A-B), but had each student bring a different flavor to the tasks. This permitted for the exploration of perspectives and nuanced understandings and empowered each student to equally contribute to constructing the final product as perspectives are analyzed in relation to one another.
Our choices in technology further amplified the effectiveness of this tool, as we created easily navigable and accessible pages for each student to develop recommendations based on his or her perspective before sharing it with other students. The linear nature of the WebQuest (with 'previous' and 'next' buttons on the bottom of every page) provided scaffolding for individual knowledge, and the inclusion of in-text links and an unchanging menu bar allowed students to quickly jump to specific sections as they progressed beyond the necessary scaffolding provided by the site.
We also included images taken during the Vietnam War to engage students and pique their interest in the topic. The visual elements, including the photos and the introductory video, were employed to make the Vietnam War, the task, and the students’ roles feel more real.
CHANGES BASED ON FEEDBACK
One of the few critiques we got on our WebQuest was that the introduction video (our "hook") didn't seem to work with every browser/OS configuration. To be specific, we had tested it in Firefox and Safari on the Mac OS, but had neglected to sufficiently test it on a Windows OS running Internet Explorer, and one or two students indicated that the embedded video would not play for them with this configuration.
To fix this, we created a link to play the video in full-screen mode (which would work in any browser/OS configuration as long as the user had a Flash player installed) and further tested it in other operating systems (including Opera, Netscape, and Chrome). Ultimately, we discovered that the embed tag did not work on some installations of MS Internet Explorer, for an unknown reason, but that the additional link permitted the user to play the video anyway.
OBSERVATIONS & REFLECTIONS
Initially, our group was concerned about our ability to produce a polished final product in little over a week. After working together for a semester, we had developed a good working relationship, confidence in our teammates’ abilities, and an understanding of one another's interests and strengths. The biggest obstacle we faced was coming up with a meaningful topic that would offer students a rich learning experience, the ability to take on roles, and the need to examine the topic from a variety of perspectives. Developing the topic took several discussions, but once it was decided, everything else fell into place.
Our familiarity with each other and our strengths was integral to the completion of the task. We met several times throughout the course of the WebQuest development, set goals, and reviewed our progress. Team members volunteered to complete tasks that were consistent with their technical strengths and interests. In the end, we produced a task that we are all proud of. Not only is it visually appealing, but it is also a great learning tool that demands students to use their critical thinking skills and to work collaboratively.
Ultimately, we were surprised at how quickly and seamlessly we completed this project. Completing the WebQuest assignment showed us the advantages of collaboration. In this case, we created a better product than any of us could have alone, and we did it faster than any one of us could have alone as well. Each team member’s contributions were significant and contributed to the production of, what we deem to be, a remarkable WebQuest.