From the program:

Bernie Dodge Friday Keynote – “New Decade, New WebQuest Thoughts” Technologically, creating a WebQuest can be very simple. As long as a teacher can create a document with hyperlinks, he or she can create a WebQuest. Making a WebQuest that truly transforms student thinking and learning requires careful planning and thinking on the part of the teacher. In this session Bernie Dodge will provide thought-provoking ideas to enhance WebQuest development and use.

I grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut (home of Holyland USA, the Playmates, Annie Leibovitz, Rosalind Russell and George Metesky), a once-great industrial city that was slowly rusting away in the ’60s. I tunnelled my way to freedom with a scholarship to WPI and never moved back. By my senior year, I knew for sure that Electrical Engineering wasn’t for me. So, after graduation, I joined the Peace Corps and taught math on Bonthe, Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone for two years.On my return, I landed a position as a very junior administrator working on a unique curricular change effort at my alma mater, WPI. Our mission was to develop projects and programs designed to broaden the experience of engineering undergraduates — to “humanize” technologists. We set up a satellite center in Washington, D.C. and organized projects in which students worked with agencies like EPA and HUD to analyze the societal effects of various technologies. It was probably at this point that I became intrigued with the systematic design of instruction. I wanted to know why some of the things we tried worked and others didn’t. That led me to IDD&E Department at Syracuse University, and directly from there to San Diego in 1980.  Teaching My main professional focus is on the design, implementation and evaluation of computer-based learning environments. The courses I teach are all variations on that theme: a doctoral class about the design of learning systems; the development of WebQuests and lessons wrapped around telecollaboration, databases and software; and all about the design of educational games and simulations. I just ended a long stint of coordinating the nine sections of class taken by pre-service teachers. I’ve developed courses about wikis, blogs, Second Life, podcasting and CMS. I’ve also guided curriculum development for the Triton and Patterns Projects, Challenge Grants of the San Diego Unified School District that are now complete. Software I’ve developed two educational packages for children (Quations published by Scholastic and Grab-a-Cab by Silver Burdett and Ginn) but boundless wealth continues to elude me. In 1994 my PLANalyst lesson planning tool was published by SuperSchool Software, and I’m working on a new version for a new publisher. HomeMaker is a free tool I wrote to help ordinary mortals create personal home pages without dealing with html. Instructional simulations and games are my particular focus because I’ve always been interested in figuring out what makes things interesting. K-12 I’m also very involved with schools and teachers. I was the founding president of San Diego Computer-Using Educators in 1982 and later served on the Board of Directors of CUE, Inc. For 6 years, I co-directed the T2ARP program which prepares student teachers to work within the technology-rich restructured environments of O’Farrell Community School and Morse High School. The T2ARP program was a finalist in the 1998 Association of Teacher Educators national competition for outstanding teacher education programs. In January 2000, clearly due to some kind of clerical error, I was named to the eSchoolNews Total Impact 30 list. A similar misunderstanding led to my being profiled in the August 2000 Converge Magazine as a shaper of ed tech’s future. From 2002 to 2005 I served on the National Educational Advisory Board for Cable in the Classroom. I’m presently on the eMINTS National Center Advisory Board.

The man who helped WebQuests go viral comes back once again to deliver our Winter Conference keynote. For that we are grateful, but we are even more grateful for the knowledge Bernie has shared with us over the years. This year’s address was no different.

In an effort to get beyond the WebQuest, Bernie is looking at “mgagement” or utilizing mobile literacies in our schools. He’s not talking about just cell phones or even smart phones, but he’s talking about any device that allows people to access the internet anywhere. Think “iPads” or other handheld devices that can access a network from almost anywhere.

Event Capture was the first way in which Bernie found to utilize mobile devices in learning. It’s a method that makes better use of field trips or on-site learning. Students create a knowledge base before, during, and after a real-life experience. A tool identified as a great resource for this type of real-life crowd-sourcing is EverNote, the free, collaborative note-taking tool for use on almost any operating system or device.

Wonder Points was another idea identified to improve “mgagement.” It’s the act of taking advantage of the natural wonderment in every human being, particularly our students. Utilizing immediate observations that can be captured via mobile devices, students can capture that wonderment and develop it into concrete learning activities.

The motivation through real-life learning and using the mobile devices that allow us to record life as never before make Bernie’s new direction toward mobile learning a logical next step from the classroom-based WebQuest. It’s truly inspiring to see that one of our long-time partners is so in-tune with the direction of educational technology. We can’t wait to see where this takes us next at eMINTS!

What about the WebQuest? There’s the WebQuest 3.0 where the critical information gathered by students comes from outside the classroom, using mobile devices. Students go out into their communities and learn about the world around them, instead of gathering all their content from the world wide web.

These are exciting developments in Bernie Dodge’s work. What Bernie does influences eMINTS greatly and should continue to take us into the future, a future where the mobile device becomes the primary mode of learning. That learning is immediate, real-world, and meaningful to our students. Sounds like a good time.