INTRODUCTION

Before we start:

A Webquest is a discovery tour, where the learner is his/her own guide! You decide where you will go to find results. Often, more than one answer is OK!

More than other Webquests, this one is less about facts and more about opinions and feelings: these are never wrong! All people are entitled to have opinions and feelings they do not have to defend. The general goal of this Webquest for you is to enhance your awareness of differences between people. Your quest makes you see that minorities in society are at greater risk of being bullied than “mainstream” groups (whatever they are).

In the old days (before the internet) people could only be bullied face to face or in letters sent by (snail-)mail. When someone would yell nasty things about you with nobody present, you could not be hurt. The only way for bullying someone anonymously was by telling others (friends, classmates) nasty things about that person, i.e., by gossiping, or by sending a letter without sender information. That has changed: people can use the internet to smear someone in the eyes of others (friends, classmates) or address that person directly. In both cases they have the choice of doing this openly or with their identity hidden. That is an essential feature of cyber-bullying: the option to stay anonymous when threatening, smearing or offending others.

TASK

Let’s start with a definition of cyber-bullying:

Cyberbullying is the process of continuous, targeted negative online messaging about a person or a well-identified group of people by someone or a group of persons sharing the same opinions or prejudices about the victim or victims. Let’s look at some terms in this definition:

• Process: this means that the action or series of actions is planned with a purpose in mind
• Continuous: actions go on overtime. Calling someone an ugly name only once does not count as cyber-bullying. Note that when the action is picked up and continued by others, it automatically becomes bullying. Example: someone publishes a nude photograph of a person on a social platform only once, but obviously to elicit reactions from others, then even before other people pass the photo on and comment, it is already cyber-bullying, because the intention of posting the photograph is to get other people involved.
• Targeted: the actions are aimed at someone specifically, well recognizable for others, maybe because of specific characteristics (being homosexual, coloured, disabled, etc.).

We want you to think about the importance of cyber-bullying, by looking into several aspects:

• who does it and why?
• who becomes a victim and why?
• what kind of individual damage is caused and for how long?
• What are the effects of hate between groups and how long will that last?
• Are the actions secretly or openly supported? By whom?

It is best to work in groups, preferably of 3-4 learners, but if you have a strong preference, you can ask your teacher if you can work alone. The group you work with should be an environment in which you feel safe and comfortable. If that is not the case, it is recommendable to work alone or change group membership. Consult your teacher about his, if necessary.

This Webquest may take 3 to 5 whole days, or it could be spread out over several weeks, a few hours a day. That’s up to you and/or your teacher.

PROCESS

RESOURCES

All your sources can be internet-based: websites, social media, Wikipedia and any other online place where relevant information is stored. However, you may also use paper-based information: newspapers, books and documents in the local or school library or wherever you find them.

Make sure you check your sources: news media may publish “coloured” information in order to attract certain categories of readers. The same applies to other media.

Whatever your source of information is, mention it. You don’t need to be objective, although that would be highly appreciated. Everything you say is OK, if your line of reasoning and the evidence you use, is transparent. Other people should be able to check your findings. That is the basic rule in science: data and reasoning must be transparent.

This is also where science and journalism go separate ways …

CONCLUSION

What did you learn about bullying and cyber-bullying? What’s the difference between these two? Did you know about bullying in its various forms already before you started to work on this Webquest?

Did this Webquest change your ideas about (cyber-)bullying and the importance of that issue? Did it perhaps change you? If so, how?

After working on these tasks: what is the knowledge or the opinions you will take along with you? What do you think about fighting against and preventing bullying? Do you share the worries about the damage it can do?

Rating your results

The table below shows how the teacher will evaluate the results of your work. We advise that you sit together (you or your group with the teacher) and go through the remarks that were made during the evaluation. Joint evaluation can also be done in a full classroom setting, provided that the whole class has worked on the same Webquest.

Teacher instruction

This Webquest is suitable for classroom work of small groups or for working in distant, online educational environments, where students work individually or again in groups. In the latter case, they will have to use modern communication facilities like web-conferencing (Skype) in order to cooperate effectively.

In the case of distant, online training, the evaluation procedure needs extra attention and care. No doubt, direct online communication between teacher and pupil(s) is required to clarify various issues.

We expect that pupils already have information about bullying from their own experience or from their peers, even before starting their Webquest. In the classroom, the teacher can introduce the subject of (cyber-)bullying in any way he/she likes, if possible by referring to recent regional news/incidents. That will emphasize the relevance of this topic.

A lot of questions and tasks will not lead to straight and absolute true answers. This Webquest is focused on stimulating pupils to develop their opinion, not to seek objective truths. Pupils may find different information, according to the sources they used, and their interpretation can be most different, depending on their position in matters related to bullying: youngsters standing closer to victims will have different opinions than those who are close friends to bullies. Teachers should have an open eye for such situations and avoid above all that the classroom will be turned into a courtroom.

Comparison of the answers given by pupils, both in the classroom and online (by using web-conferencing) is an important part of the evaluation of this Webquest.

It is good for pupils to be aware of (cyber-)bullying if it is real for them or not. For some, this Webquest may be the start of developing their own opinion and moving to action.

Evaluation of learning achievements

In this section we will not dive very deep into the underlying educational theories about evaluation and testing: there’s too much out there than we could possibly cover in this small project report.

Instead, we want to concentrate on procedures that enable both students/pupils and their teachers to establish if the learning goals of the Webquest were achieved and, if so, to what extent. We recommend teachers make use of a combined evaluation procedure, that consists of:

1. Statements by learners (after being asked to do so)
   • telling what they learned about the subject (knowledge-oriented self-evaluation): now (after going through the Webquest) I know that …
   • telling what he/she learned about herself/himself (formative evaluation, in this case, diagnostic self-evaluation): now (after going through the Webquest) I know about myself that I …
     This pair of basic statements add up to a so-called learner report, in which the pupil/student reflects on what the Webquest brought him/her in terms of acquired knowledge and new personal views and attitudes concerning the subject.

   For instance:

   • ‘I learned that in medieval times the hygiene of people was hardly a concern which helped to let epidemic diseases like the Plague cause so many casualties’ Or:
   • ‘I learned the facts and I know the earth is warming, but I cannot understand why people were so stupid to pollute the world and let it warm up so much.
   • ‘I learned from the information about diseases that this subject is more appealing to me than I would expect in advance: maybe I should consider a medical career’. Or:
     ‘The Webquests confirms what I thought already: I could not care less about the climate and global warming. In fact, I thought it was all a hoax and I still do!’

   This kind of assessment seems more subjective than it actually is: in his standard work on testing and evaluation (and much more), simply called Methodology (1974), Prof. A.D. de Groot described how consistent the student’s self-evaluations appeared to be: when asked again after 5 or 10 years, their evaluation would almost be the same. De Groot advised teachers to use the learner report as a start for joint evaluations, striving for consensus between teacher and student/pupil about the learning outcomes and their value for the learner, but also compared with the learning objectives as stated in the curriculum.

2. The learning achievements are visible in the output produced by the students: it is physical evidence: reports, answers to questions asked in the Webquest, presentations, and performance during presentations (preferably recorded). The teacher completes an evaluation grid stating clearly what the learning outcomes for the student/pupil are. The categories in the grid can be modified by the teacher to cover more precisely the content of a Webquest.

   We advise teachers to use the grid to start a joint evaluation discussion, aiming at consensus or at least understanding between the teacher and the student/pupil about the learning outcomes: were they achieved (as planned in the curriculum and communicated before the Webquest started) and to what extent? To communicate the learning goals clearly before any learning activity starts, is a transparency requirement that is widely acknowledged in the educational community. The history of making learning objectives explicit goes back to the evaluation ‘Bible’ by Bloom, Hastings and Madaus: ‘Handbook on formative and summative evaluation of student learning’ (1971), a standard work that also served as inspiration for the earlier mentioned Prof. De Groot.

The procedure also applies when students/pupils have worked together on a Webquest. The teacher will ask questions about individual contributions: ‘What did you find? What part did you write? How did you find the illustrations? Who made  the final presentation?’

All the evidence (of learning efforts and outcomes plus joint evaluations) is preferably stored in the learning portfolio of the student, or in any other suitable storage system (folders with written or printed documents, online collection of files, etcetera ).

Changes in personal points of view and feelings are harder to value and here the consensus between teacher and student/pupil about experiences during the learning process provides essential insights.

The grid below gives an example of how the evaluation of the learning process and achievements can be shaped: what kind of reactions to the Webquest does the teacher expect and how valuable are they? Is the teacher capable to explain the value or score allocated to answers or presentations given by pupils? Does the pupil/student understand the evaluation outcomes, and does he/she agree? If an agreement (consensus is not possible, it is still the teacher who decides how to value the student’s work.

Please note that the text in the grid addresses the pupil/student directly: this is important and it is in fact a prerequisite for using such an evaluation grid: it is specifically meant to enable a discussion of learning results between teacher and student and not to communicate learning achievements of learners to others who had no direct role in the Webquest.

Evaluation Grid