iPads in New York: Trip Report

Nine students from the University of Chester used iPads during their recent fieldtrip to New York. The trip focused on social exclusion and urban regeneration in NYC and students were encouraged to use the iPads however they saw fit. Trials of Twitter and Fotobabble were encouraged and used to a good level of success.

                                    

The students found the technology really enhanced their experience during the trip. Early issues of lack of 3G access were overcome due to the sheer number of wi-fi hotspots available in NYC (namely Starbucks!).

Twitter was especially popular with the students who used it as a reflective tool and to post photos. The staff members on the trip found this particularly useful as they could also share their experiences through the hashtag #gdschester and see how students were enjoying and reflecting on their experiences over the course of the fieldwork.

"Top of empire state. Cracking views. iPads working well even at this height in the dark!" (@gdschester3)

"Ellis island more positive atmosphere than expected. More hope than disapointment " (@gdschester2)





Livescribe pens were also used and were popular with the students : "Livescribe pens more than useful" (@gdschester2)


                                             

The educational values of the iPad were so apparent that two of the staff members accompanying the students also purchased iPads plus a number of students were considering purchasing an iPad in the coming months.

Fieldwork and technology x2

May is a busy month for the Enhancing Fieldwork Learning project! We have two fieldtrips taking place this month, first one is to the Big Apple......New York City! Our Human Geographers here at the University of Chester will be investigating social exclusion, migration and urban regeneration. 

The students are taking iPads and Livescribe pens with them to interview people, make observations and interact with one another. 

We will be trialling Twitter, Fotobabble and iTalk with the student groups.  

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Next on the agenda is the Physical Geography trip to Almeria in South-East Spain. 

Students will be making use of netbooks to enter their data whilst out in the field and also will have access to aerial photographs on the netbooks whilst out in the field. 

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We are looking forward to talking to the students when they return to gathering their perspectives on using technology on the fieldtrips. 

Augmented Reality – Bringing Ecosystem Services to life!

Today we present the first in a series of guest blog posts, the first of which comes from Sarah Taigel at the University of East Anglia. 

Traditionally rural landscapes have been managed primarily for agriculture and forestry. However the landscape provides a wealth of other natural benefits (ecosystem services) to human kind, some obvious such as food and fresh water, and some so subtle they do not feature in the public consciousness (National Ecosystem Assessment, 2011). The National Ecosystem Assessment has highlighted growing individual consumerism as one source of pressure on ecosystem services; there is a need to communicate to people the link between personal behaviour and pressures on the ecosystem services in the landscape.

Figure 1. VesAR screenshots

I created an augmented reality applet called VesAR (Visualising ecosystem services using Augmented Reality) (see Figure 1 above) which can be downloaded onto mobile smartphones. The secure applet runs within LayAR which can be downloaded from iTunes or Android marketplace. VesAR uses the smartphones camera, GPS, compass, accelerometer and needs an internet connection (see Figure 2). GPS determines the exact location of the device (within a few meters) and the compass and accelerometer determine the field of view. The person using the device sees the world via the camera image which is displayed on the screen, this is overlaid, or augmented, with additional information (POIs – Points of Interest) in the form of text and images via mobile internet to both locate and describe the ecosystem service. In the summer of 2012 two smartphones and a Galaxy tablet will be used to trial the applet on guided tours of the Gaywood catchment in Norfolk. The survey results will hopefully tell me the degree with which people engage with and understand ecosystem services and how the use of technology can assist in the communication of scientific information.

Figure 2. VesAR architecture

VesAR development has been relatively straightforward after trials of the applet were moved to a nearby floodplain reducing interference from buildings. Installing GPS Test meant that the accuracy of the GPS fix could be verified before initialising the VesAR applet. Continued issues include the GPS draining battery, exacerbated by the screen running at full brightness for outdoor use; alternative charging sources are being tested for use in the field. The Environmental Sciences department at the UEA has been supportive and interested in the use of this technology within my research project; particular interest has been shown in using the BGS iGeology application on fieldwork courses. The hardware will be used on fieldwork and in the curriculum to introduce students to the power of location based information and the ease with which information can be communicated between devices and the lab or desk. 

Sarah Taigel is an ESRC funded PhD researcher at the University of East Anglia, her PhD topic is “visioning catchment futures” and focuses on communicating ecosystem services currently obtained from the catchment landscape. Sarah also uses scenario modelling to explore how the provision of ecosystem services may change in the future.  The views expressed in this blog piece are the authors and not those of the University.

Weather-proof iPad cases

This iPad case made by Griffin costs in the region of £25-£40 depending on Amazon price variation. We wanted an iPad case that could withstand the British weather and could survive being dropped onto a hard surface without having sensitivity of the screen compromised.

After extensive field testing last week in wet (and at times sunny) Devon, UK, we can feel confident that these cases stand up to the wettest conditions.  One student commented that "cameras and phones came back broken, the only thing left standing were the iPads".  The cases also calmed a lot of anxieties that the students had as they felt the iPads were more robust in their cases.

Negative points: the stand is a bit flimsy, but we barely used it on the trip. The weight of the iPad doubles when the case is on, again, it only weighs the same as a large notepad but if you are on an expedition and trying to travel light, this may be an issue. Overall, the benefits and durability far outweight

Slapton 2012 - iPad apps in the field.

Two of the project team spent a week at FSC Slapton Ley testing out various iPad apps with 67 level four students.  3G connection in the area was relatively poor which limited the extent to which we could test some of the apps which rely on location services such as Flickr, Panoramio and Twitter, but we made use of some offline apps such as GeoMeasure and Numbers, both of which were popular with the students.



 The students suggested that the apps were really easy to use with little assistance required. The only app they felt they needed more assistance with was Numbers as it worked differently to Excel and required more time for the students to graph data.



Each member of the first group were asked to describe using Twitter on the iPads in 3 words. "Fun, useful, paperless, convenient and easy" stand out as the positive feedback about the iPads. "3G, Wet and Risky" stand out as the less positive feedback about the iPads (though we suspect "WET" was in reference to the British weather in February rather than the iPads - incidentally the iPad cases we used were excellent in the rain, we will follow up on this with a blog post in the next few weeks).  "3G" was in reference to the lack of 3G coverage in the area which meant that the Tweets saved as drafts before being uploaded minus location data back at the Field Centre.

On the whole, the feedback was extremeley postive towards the iPads and the apps we chose to trial. An annotated Pin board has been put together describing different apps and how useful they are for fieldwork.  You can view that on Pinterest here: http://pinterest.com/efieldworkl/ipad-apps-for-fieldwork/

 

Next fieldtrip location is New York City where our field tester (Derek) has already confirmed 3G is not a problem!

Technology Enhanced Fieldwork - Superlinks #1

Back to the occasional series of the mid-week link up with interesting blog posts and Twitter updates found on the internet in the last 7 days.

* Thanks to Chris Thomson from Netskills for linking to this blog post by the Guardian about shooting and editing videos on smartphones. Click HERE.

*Thanks (again!) to Chris Thomson from Netskills for linking to this update from Flickr about Geofences, very useful for anyone using location data on iPads and Smartphones. 

* Mashable's take on why iPads won't revolutionise education...yet. Do you agree with this?

* Aurasma - Could this be the future of QR codes? We'll be trying this app out in the next fortnight and blogging our findings.

* Save our fieldwork petition from the Field Studies Council - if you value outdoor education centres, please consider signing this petition .

We'd love to hear any comments you have on these technologies, especially if you have used any of them. 

Re-launch of our project website

If you are a regular visitor to the Enhancing Fieldwork Learning website, you might have noticed some changes taking place. Our new web developer Ben has been putting together an improved version of our website. The most significant change is the problems/resources section which we intend to update regularly as new resources are created.

We hope to bring you regular updates and resources via the blog and the website. Interested in technology? Don't forget our showcase event, see more information HERE.

Test

Testing

Showcase Event Report 1

The Enhancing Fieldwork Learning showcase event took place this past weekend at Margam Discovery Centre and was a great success. Thank you to everyone who participated for making it such a good event.We hope to update the blog and website over the next few weeks with resources, links and comments from participants.

A taster of the event can be seen on this video produced by Chris Thomson from Netskills. The video was both recorded and edited on a Smartphone and took approximately 30 minutes to edit using Vimeo software (free).

Enhancing Fieldwork Learning from Chris Thomson on Vimeo.

Upcoming Conference Talks and Workshops

At least one of the Enhancing Fieldwork Learning team will be available to talk to at the following conferences and workshops where an oral presentation about the project will be given:

Teaching and learning for GEES students, Birmingham~ 30th June - 1st July

Effective Learning in Biosciences, Edinburgh~ 30th June - 1st July

Personal Learning Environments Conference, Southampton ~ 11th - 13th July.

Royal Geographic Society Conference, London ~ 31st August - 2nd September (Chairing and presenting: Enhancing Fieldwork Learning)

University of Chester Staff Conference, Chester, 14th September, 2011.

Enhancing Fieldwork Learning Showcase Event, Port Talbot, 16th-18th September, 2011 ** Click HERE to find out how to participate.

ISSOTL Conference, Milwaukee ~ 20th-23rd October 2011.

Using Livescribe in fieldwork

Livescribe pen and paper (Source)

Livescribe is an interactive Smartpen which allows you to take notes and record audio at the same time.

For a full demonstration, see the video below.






The Livescribe 8Gb Pulse is the most recent release of this Smartpen and costs around £160.


The pen makes use of special paper which can be purchased in notebooks for approximately £20 for 4 notebooks, not too much more than a standard notebook.

The benefits of using Livescribe in fieldwork are particularly apparent when interviewing.  Data can be quickly analysed and audio can be rapidly replayed in the field, which allows students to synthesise the data and identify areas which may require more data collection.

Upon loading the text and audio into the desktop version of Livescribe, the handwritten text is searchable. 

We expect this to be a key tool for enhancing fieldwork accessibility for students with additional needs.

We will be trialling the pen with a group of students in the next week or two who are visiting New York as part of their human geography programme, so check back for a update later this month.

Mid-week link up

Two useful links for Technology for Education enthusiasts this week:

• 2010 Horizon report - emerging technologies and their potential impact on higher education
• ECAR Study - the influence of IT on college life. 

Howgill Fells Fieldtrip: Using Video and thoughts for the future

A group of 20 final year Geography and Natural Hazards students from the University of Chester were taken to the Howgill Fells in Northern England as part of a one night, two day trip to study fluvial geomorphology and how climate has impacted this environment.

In addition to data gathering field techniques, we asked each group of students (6-8 per group) to produce two short videos using digital cameras and tripods provided by the University.  Firstly we asked that  they produce a video about one of the methods that they had used and secondly, we required a video describing the landscape around them. 

The first video required them to reflect on what they had done, why they had used that particular method and what data they had as a result of the method.

The second video required the students to reflect upon the "Cook's Tour" -style snippets that had been given to them throughout the day and also upon the data that they had gathered to make sense of their landscape.  The students worked together to decide on key descriptors of the landscape before videoing themselves talking. 

The students described the video as "fun" and it was a quick exercise for reflecting on the day and fieldwork whilst still in the field.  The group plans to watch the videos when back at the University which encourages repetition of key ideas that came from the day.

Staff members observed that some of the students found the concept of aggradation and incision in fluvial environments one of the more challenging ideas.  The Enhancing Fieldwork Learning team suggested that next time the trip runs, animations or short video clips of aggradation and incision could be loaded onto mp3 players (already available for student use in the Department of Geography and Development Studies, University of Chester) or Smartphones that are mp3 enabled (student-owned) so that students have another visual aid to help them with this concept, whilst in a dynamic landscape which is characteristic of aggradation and incision.

Geo-tagging for human geography

We recently trialled some geo-tagging software with a group of students on a fieldtrip to Devon. We suggested the idea, told them to download Flickr (free app) for their (personally-owned) iPhone and let them run with applying the idea to their project which was centred around the impact of second homes in the local area.

To promote inclusivity and roll this idea out further we have trialled some other software which reduces the dependence on smart phones.

We hope to publish our results and methodology for this resource in the near future.

Enhancing Fieldwork Learning: Dictation software

Enhancing Fieldwork Learning: Dictation software

Interesting! I have just installed the latest Dragon Dictate on my Mac Air. I am still training it for technical words and will report back on this for various configurations. The idea is to use it as a field notebook. However, it may suffer from ambient noise disturbing things (better noise cancelling mic other than the Plantronics one supplied might help). This could be a problem with wind noise in the field. However, the biggest problem for transcribing interviews will be the need to train the software for each user. I'll try this anyway and report back.

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.