Joy Luck Club Webquest... Impressed?

Software/Website Title: Assimilation in America

Website URL: http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/plegal/tips/t5prod/gershwq2.html

Grade/Age Level: Looks like high school

Language & Content: English -- It is a webquest based on the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
This webquest seems to have all of the parts of a standard webquest, although that is not usually the case as I found when I did a Google search and found several websites only masquarading as webquests. Anyway, the sections were there and there was some attempt to make them attractive and organized. The introduction and task set out were fairly creative and seemed to have just enough zip that many students would find them interesting. THere is the idea that these studetns are part of an immigration and assimilation department in the U.S. government, not bad. In fact, there is a step in the webquest when studetns were asked to reflect upon their own expereiences of coming to America, leading me to believe that this is in fact a CALL style site for an ELL class. That makes sense since there is such an identity and assimilation bent in the novel itself. One of the resource links didn't work, but for the most part there seemed to be a variety of resources that were valuable: class projects, online journals, and publlic radio. There were some reasonably helpful "help" links that the teacher created and hyperlinked to her process list. There seemed to be a decent table exlaining the rubric to be implemented.

There was a vagueness to many parts of the project that would likely hurt its implementation. The task semed fairly straight forward and organized until a seemingly loosely related strand (how to assimilate better) became the focus without using consistent, specific terminology to aid in that transformation. It simply became "what is the problem?" I have a feeling there were questions at that point. It almost seems like that section was a revision that wasn't smoothly integrated, and the author left the old project, but tacked on a new section. The external documents meant to aid int he collection were also rather vague. They did not give many examples or specific guiding questions. It seems almost impossible that this doesn't need a fair amount of classroom guidance just on the project's task, which leaves less for teachable moments and strategy. I must say that the process/tasks seem worthwhile and have good variety but lack unity. Maybe the author could have the agent apply for the position (thus doing self-reflection) and later take his/her first assignment. Finally, although there were a couple references to group work, there really were no guidelines as to roles within the groups that could be manipulated to allow for preferences in learning style. THat could easily be rectified.

I did choose this topic because it is very likely that I will choose it for my own webquest project. I am impressed byt he creativity that people show in these projects and I am curious to see how I will match up... considering time pressures and technological constraints that hamper so many efforts.