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).
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| 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.
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| Lough Erne, the small islands in the centre are thought to be drumlins. |
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| Looking across Lough Erne towards the Atlantic Ocean which can be seen on the horizon on the left of the photograph |
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| 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. |
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| Looking over to Mullaghmore. |
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| 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? | | | |
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A beautiful Autumn day, sunny and not too cold
- a perfect example of typical Geography fieldtrip weather! |
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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.
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