"What Would Socrates Say?"

After reading "What Would Socrates Say?" by Peter W. Cookson Jr., it's clear to me that Socrates would only approve of WebQuests if the following occurred:

1. Students had to discuss and work together to find an answer;
2. Some moral/ethical question is being answered; and
3. The answer that is found leads to a deeper question to be answered.

Cookson makes a good point in the introduction to this article by saying, "Google has given us the world at our fingertips, but speed and ubiquity are not the same as actually "knowing" something." If students are surfing through WebQuests individually without really answering any helpful question or fulfilling some important goal, then the focus is on internet navigation and ease of finding information instead of digging deeper for an answer. According to this article, Socrates believed that honest debate and discussion was the best way to learn; and, if we don't approach learning in this same way in this technological era, we may "drown in a sea of trivia" instead of rising on a "tide of possibility and promise." Even though many people think of education as a personal experience, Socrates would argue that our collective intelligence and what we all can bring to the table is more important for everyone's learning than each of us learning on our own. Everyone brings different experiences and different ideas to the table; why not use all of those experiences and ideas to teach an important lesson, examine an important problem, find a useful solution, etc.? If WebQuests do these things in a COLLECTIVE fashion, then Socrates would approve of them. Otherwise, he might not be so thrilled about the idea.
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I reviewed the WebQuest taxonomy and couldn't exactly pinpoint one particular task that my WebQuest falls under. I did, however, narrow my WebQuest into two categories: a "Retelling" task and a "Persuasion" task, since, in my WebQuest, students will be summarizing and describing their independent reading book to other students and try to either persuade or dissuade them from reading that same book.