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!

You probably have heard or read about Twitter: it is an information and discussion platform used by millions of people all over the world.

The influence of social media on our daily life is becoming stronger, especially in politics and social-cultural interactions. People try to influence the opinions of other people by using online platforms. These days politicians have to be aware of discussions and statements on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms. Twitter users try to influence politicians as well as voters. They bring facts, news and visions. Besides that, they produce a mix of real and fake facts.

In this Webquest, you will discover the importance of Twitter and that is your main learning goal. You may agree or doubt that it has become an important element of politics, replacing traditional ways for discussion and decision making.

TASK

Before we start: name all social media you are using. Then list all the social media you have heard of. You don’t have to disclose what you are doing there, just make a list of the platforms that you know and describe for each their most important characteristics in one or two sentences.

We want you to think about the importance of Twitter in daily life. You need to understand the tweets that you read, even if their meaning is not easy to see. Below you will find tweets and we will ask questions to help you to understand them.

You will work in groups of 3-4 learners. 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 your teacher.

Before we set out to explore Twitter, you need to make an account on Twitter, so you can have full access to the platform. If you already have an account there, make a new one for the group, just for the purpose of this Webquest. You can delete it afterwards (and use your own again).

PROCESS

Below you see tweets to analyse, choose four of the tweets below and tell the story behind them, as much as you can find. Don’t be satisfied easily: often the tweets refer to items in the news. To understand the tweets, you will have to look to other media as well (newspapers, news sites and other social media). Visit a library if you need to.

We have 2 series of 4 tweets, 8 in total. The first is about Politics & Society (1-4), the second is about Sports & Music (a-d). Choose two tweets from each series to work with.

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: especially news media may publish “coloured” information, if only to please their owners. For instance: Fox-news in the USA is owned by the conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch who is a well-known supporter of the Republicans and especially of President Donald Trump. This may affect the objectivity of Fox. The same applies for other media, like Chinese state media and the Pravda in Russia: some are clearly biased over economic and political issues and represent the opinions of the people in power rather than objective facts.

These days all news media have their Twitter-accounts, just like anyone who is for some reason important to a broad audience. It shows how powerful Twitter can be or become.

Bonus question: is objectivity of news media important?

If “no”: explain your choice.

If “yes”: explain your choice.

CONCLUSION

Write down what you learned about Twitter (and perhaps about yourself) while working on the tasks: what will you take along with you?

Did your research change your views and ideas about society, about certain individuals, or about the way things go in our society?

Are you a regular user of social media? What is the value of social media for you?

Rating your results

The table below shows how the teacher will evaluate the results of your work. We advise that you sit together (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 all groups in this class have 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 (like Skype, Zoom, Webex) in order to cooperate effectively.

In the case of distant, online training, the evaluation procedure needs extra attention and care. No doubt it will require online communication between teacher and pupil(s) to clarify certain issues.

Many questions and tasks will not lead to straight and absolute true answers. One of the most prominent learning goals for the pupils is that they develop search strategies to find information. Their road towards the results they find is just as important as the result itself. Also important is the ability they should develop to make a distinction between acclaimed facts that are not probable and those that are credible.

In some cases, pupils will find different information, according to the sources they were able to find. Comparison and discussion of the answers given by pupils, both in the classroom and online (by using web-conferencing) is an important aspect of any Webquest in sCOOL-IT.

After all, we need to be talking about social media in a social context, i.e. in groups!

Some of the footnotes are meant to help the learners to find answers, but a few are giving away the results of the search that learners will have to do. Teachers should make sure to take those hints out before introducing this Webquest to the learners. 

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