Dictation software

On Monday 21st February, six groups of students from the University of Chester interviewed various ethnic groups and refugee/asylum groups across the city.  The students were well prepared before they went, they knew what questions they wanted to ask the interviewees and had taken dictaphones with them to record the interviews.

Image from Dragon Dictation Website

One way in which technology may enhance the student learning experience is to use Dragon Dictation software so that the conversation is transcribed for them.  A possible pitfall is that not all of the words will be transcribed correctly as there will be new voices.  However an iPhone app is available for those who have access to an iPhone and although it is dependent on an internet (3G) signal, it would be useful for this type of fieldwork in the UK. I would be interested to see if and indeed how it might enhance the student learning experience.

FSC Slapton Sands Fieldwork and Technology

 The single honours Geography and Natural Hazard Management students from the University of Chester spent seven days in the Field Studies Council centre in Slapton Sands, Devon experiencing a range of fieldwork. 

The first year students were taken on a "Cook's Tour" of the local area which included field teaching of coastal landforms and processes, understanding a local flood management scheme in the nearby village of Harbertonford  and experience of interviewing people in other local villages.  

The students then devised their own projects in small groups which had between 3 and 5 students

We had ideally hoped to trial some augmented reality apps for the iPhone but it seems that the free app we had planned to use has developed a number of bugs. We hope to revisit this in the future and in the meantime will continue a search for an established augmented reality app that we could use as part of the field course. 

We took four netbooks with us which were a big hit with the students, particularly during the evenings when work on group presentations were in full flow. We also hooked up a netbook to a printer which worked well for the most part, but as the netbooks currently have Open Office software, some of the student's documents were not compatible (pictures from documents were temporarily lost) as they had produced the documents in MS Word.  We would resolve this issue by either installing MS Office on the netbooks or asking the students to use the netbooks to create the documents in Open Office which would subsequently reduce the compatibility issues.

One group of students wanted to use a netbook in the field, but the ArcGIS software that was available was not powerful enough to complete the tasks that they required. A full version of ArcMap would be needed and it is likely that we will trial this in the future, however, we have to consider that the netbooks have limited memory (2Gb RAM) and limited hard drive space.  Ideally we wanted to use open source software where possibly, but understand that in some instances this may not be possible.   

Instead, the students used a laptop in the field instead and found it heavy and awkward but useful as they could change the attributes table of buildings at risk from flooding in the field, something which is traditionally done on paper and then edited in a GIS later on in the evening.  It is likely that they would have found the netbook much more portable and after some discussion, a tablet computer would be better for this type of exercise, something that the project team will consider for future trials. 

A special update on the use of Geotagging in the field will be on this blog later this week!

Evaluation Workshop

The external evaluator for this project  is Professor Mick Healey who ran a workshop with the team on 19th November 2010 to discuss good methods of evaluation.  It was suggested that we should use the Theory of Change approach (Hart et al., 2009) to evaluate our project. 

Mick outlines that:

"The framework attempts to develop an understanding of the relationships between outcomes and the activities

and contextual factors which may influence the outcomes.  One of the attractions of the ToC approach is that it may be used to extend our understanding of a project, rather than audit it.  Hence the key question in our case might be, for example: “What have we learned about enhancing fieldwork learning?”.  It is essentially a narrative approach, which tells the story of the project."

The team completed the pro-forma with the headings:

Components of Theory of Change

1.    Current situation:

2.    Enabling Factors / Resources:

3.    Processes / Activities:

4.    Desired Outcomes:

5.    Longer-term impact:

This approach facilitated a brainstorming session and one of the key outcomes of this approach was the decision that the name of the project should be changed to the more generic: Enhancing Fieldwork Learning.

The first version of the Theory of Change will be our baseline from which all subsequent versions can be compared to to demonstrate how the project has changed and moved forward.


References:
Hart, D., Diercks-O’Brien, A.G. and Powell, A. (2009) Exploring stakeholder engagement in impact evaluation planning in educational development work, Evaluation, 15: 285-306

Field Work: DerryGonnelly October 2010

Our first meeting took place in Derrygonnelly, Northern Ireland.  Julian Park, Derek France and Katharine Welsh joined Brian Whalley and the second year cohort of Geography students from Queen's University Belfast. 

We enjoyed a pleasant weekend at the Field Studies Council in Derrygonnely, a great location to host our first meeting.  Brian distributed a student-centred questionnaires amongst ~ 70 students about the software and hardware that they use at present for their learning in general (not specific to the fieldwork).

Field Centre accomodation in Derrygonnely.

We joined Brian's fieldtrip on the Saturday and enjoyed much of the local landscape whilst gaining an insight to how students interact on fieldwork.This part of the trip was a 'Cook's Tour' style activity to orientate students before moving on to the 'Problem Solving' later in the day.

Lough Erne, the small islands in the centre are thought to be drumlins.

Looking across Lough Erne towards the Atlantic Ocean which can be seen on the horizon on the left of the photograph

The group moved on to Mullaghmore in County Sligo (Republic of Ireland) to investigate the sand dunes and take some GPS measurements of beach profiles to contrast the work they had carried out in the morning along the river.

Looking over to Mullaghmore.

We then stopped at Bundoran, a popular surfing spot to look at the diamicts or "boulder clay" which mysteriously lacked boulders. A possible dissertation project?

 

A beautiful Autumn day, sunny and not too cold 
- a perfect example of typical Geography fieldtrip weather!

On Sunday, Julian Park and Katharine Welsh spoke to some of these students and demonstrated how we might use netbooks and GIS in the field.  The students were interested in the project and  extremely keen to use cutting edge technology (iPads and iPhones) in the field.