To be a great WebQuest designer, you need to have a large kit bag of ideas about tasks to set before your students. It's too easy to fall into the rut of kids-read--->kids-present-what-they-read type lessons, especially when there are so many alternatives.

This exercise is designed to familiarize you with the WebQuest Taskonomy and to give you practice at generating possible approaches to treating a given topic. It will take approximately one hour.

Stage 1: Take a Perspective
You're going to look at tasks from one of four points of view. The first step is for you to look at examples of WebQuests of certain types (2 to 4 different types per role).

You'll be assigned a role at the start of the exercise. Take fifteen minutes to internalize the definitions of the task categories for your role by studying the examples.

You're the type who brings order out of chaos and confusion. You like taking a fuzzy situation and imposing structure on it, making decisions and judgments and organizing what's random. To get into your role, study the Compilation and Judgment categories of the Taskonomy.

When you design tasks for a WebQuest, you look for opportunities to take information scattered in various locations and in various formats and organize them into a database like format. You like encouraging the kind of thinking involved in inventing categories of information and choosing how to put the information into some rational order.

You are also attracted to the kinds of learning that take place when one is forced to make informed judgments about something. You invent scenarios which require a just and rational decision, like a trial, or a rank ordering, like a contest.

You're both creative and systematic. You enjoy tasks that require learners to create solutions that work within realistic constraints, or to create artistic products that work within established genres. To get into your role, study the Design and Creative Product categories of the Taskonomy.

As you look at WebQuest tasks, you look for opportunities for students to write plays or poems or songs, or to design events or things that meet a need. You're sensitive to the need to balance creativity against effectiveness.

You're a master of people. You know yourself and you know what makes others tick. You like designing tasks that engage learners in listening to divergent opinions and finding common ground, or taking an issue that a given audience would be opposed to or at least indifferent to, and asking learners to sway opinions. You like tasks that guide learners into examining their own opinions, strengths and failings and becoming more self-aware as a result. To get into your role, study the Self-Knowledge, Persuasion and Consensus Building categories of the Taskonomy.

You're the investigative type. You enjoy tasks that present learners with incomplete information and invites them to delve deeper to make sense of it. You like mysteries, scientific puzzles, and just figuring out what's really going on. To get into your role, study the Journalistic, Scientific, Analytical, and Mystery categories of the Taskonomy.