Mobilising Remote Student Engagement

I joined the second day of the weekend field trip which focussed on The Duver near St Helens on the Isle of Wight. My role was as an observer in terms of student uses of personal technologies on the trip , especially in terms of an activity being run by Dr Stuart Downward using SMS messaging, but also to run some further trials.  Of particular interest were technologies that could enhance collaboration amongst students across the field site and between students in the field and those back at the institution.  Of particular inspiration is the work of the Inner Space Center where they use telepresense to enable real-time collaboration between staff on undersea oceanographic missions and those back in the Center.  Dr Robert Ballard founder of the Center stated in reference to a deep sea mission that “With teams ashore at the University of Rhode Island and University of Washington, more intellectual capital was conveniently accessible to the mission”.

The following technologies were trialled:

Live Video feeds using a 3G enabled mobile phone.  Qik was used allowing a live video stream to be fed to a website with the additional capability for text based interaction.  Some success was achieved but with a significant lag in the video appearing on the website.  This was probably due to the very variable signal strength / 3G signal in the field area.  In one experiment a live video stream was taken of a particular section of the beach while the student group asked questions and made observations about coastal erosion.  Due to the lag live interaction was not feasible on-site but it did provide a method for publishing video in near real-time.

Live Tracking using a mobile phone with integrated GPS. The Instamapper mobile phone application was used which broadcasts a geographical reference (in addition to altitude, speed and bearing) at a given time interval which can be fed to a public website.  The track is also recorded and can be exported and displayed via Google maps.  This facility could be used to:

- enable students back at the institution to access relevant resources / real-time databases / perform analyses relevant to the location and feedback to the field group

- confirm sampling strategies / geographical gaps in data collection

The following link shows one of the tracks recorded on The Duver using a mobile phone with integrated GPS.  The geographical reference and other data can be accessed by clicking on individual data points.

http://www.instamapper.com/trk?key=2642287017959854978

Voice communication. This of course is the most basic function of a mobile phone.  However Mobile Skype was used to communicate with a member of staff centrally placed in the field trip hotel who was networked using locally provided WiFi.  This worked effectively especially in combination with other tools such as mobile tracking.  This also provided a further option for setting up conference calls between field groups.

Microblogging. Dr Ken Field and Dr James O’Brien demonstrated uses of geocoded Twitter postings on the previous Malta fieldtrip (#Malta09) and they are continuing to develop these applications. During the Isle of Wight fieldtrip I used the mobile Twitter application Ubertwitter which allows geocoding as well as the ability to identify twitter postings by location. Of particular interest  was the potential use of this application for students to post and share in real time geocoded field observations.  See Twitter posts with the hashtags #morse and #iow.

Photographs. Dedicated cameras  / mobile integrated cameras are an extremely useful tool on fieldtrips for recording features and environments.  These photographs can be saved and downloaded at a later date for analysis.  However it is a straightforward task to publish these in near real-time using for example a Twitter linked photo application (e.g. Twitpic, Tweetphoto) or via a dedicated photograph sharing site.  This can be done with or without a dedicated application, though a dedicated application will tend to provide more options. In this case the Flickr mobile application was used  providing the ability to upload  photographs along with a geographical reference, description and keywords.  This provides a powerful mechanism for sharing images in near real-time along with attached field notes.  These notes can be further updated at a later time and can be commented on by others.  Photographs tagged with Morse and IoW taken on the trip.  The 2 megapixel images took approximately up to 2-3 minutes to upload.

Audio recording. Many mobile phones have the ability to record audio which can be useful for recording audio field notes that can be downloaded and shared at a later date.  There are also tools such as Gabcast that allow audio files to be recorded and published directly from a mobile.

The above information channels were published via single web page allowing potential participants to view the information from one location and additionally published within a VLE using RSS feeds and included scripts. Students would also have the option to integrate the various streams within their personal learning environment as they saw appropriate.

There is a balance to be achieved between dedicated personal technologies, specialist field devices and integrated mobile phones with battery life being a major factor.  In carrying out the above trials a fully charged mobile battery did not last the day.

- Tim Linsey

Data was collected from 160 GIS, Geology and Geography students from Kingston University who went on a field trip to the Isle of Wight. The students received a pre-field trip questionnaire while traveling to the island. This questionnaire was about the students’ level of access to mobile technologies and about their perceptions about the use of mobile technologies to support their learning on fieldtrips. During the field trip, students were observed. In addition, several one-to-one interviews were conducted with the students in the evening. They were asked which technologies they had used during the day and which additional technologies would have been useful. On their way back to London, the 160 students completed a post-field trip questionnaire.  We are now processing the data into a digital format. A big “thank you” to all lecturers involved in the data collection processes.

Dr Ann Ooms

The KU GIS team of Dr Ken Field and Dr James O’Brien assisted by new MRes student Howard Macey went along to the Isle of Wight (along with other KU MoRSE researchers Dr Stuart Downward, Dr Ann Ooms and Dr Tim Linsey).

Drs Field and O’Brien were determined to test a number of items of mobile mapping equipment but the most useful for the MoRSE project was a solution developed by Dr O’Brien making use of an ArcGIS Server and a set of PDAs running ArcPad.

The server situated in Kingston served data to the PDAs in the field using a GSM 3G/GPRS mobile data connection. Data was then created and edited on the PDAs by the staff (simulating student group work similar to that undertaken in Malta) and the data synchronised back to the Kingston hosted server in real time. Each PDA was able to see the data created/edited on the others.
The goal of this test was twofold – firstly to reduce the time needed for students to aggregate their collected data prior to analysis in the field. Typically this process takes 1-2 hours delaying the students performing tasks. The new approach takes only a few minutes and the data is instantly available to all students via a download from the server to the desktop version of ArcGIS that they are familiar with.

The second goal is to allow students to build consensus around topics / concepts in the field on the fly. For example students can compare in close to real-time landuse concepts / categories and build a shared understanding (or ontology) of what abandoned farm land (for example) looks like. Students in the field assign attributes to polygons, can take photos with their PDAs and share these back to the server making them available to other students for download as exemplars.

The test was performed on the Isle of Wight to make use of a location away from the typical infrastructure of the University (forcing the client/server connection and mobile communication techniques to be used) and also to make use of the relatively cheap UK mobile data transfer rates (in comparison to Malta). Alternative approaches for accomplishing this on Malta are currently being examined.

On the last KU GIS field course to Malta MoRSE team members Dr Ken Field and Dr James O’Brien decided that we’d link together remote student engagement with some real-time tracking and a little web cartography (or to use a term coined by Dr Field – cartoblography).

Building on the UK Snow map work by Ben Marsh (http://www.benmarsh.co.uk/snow/) we implemented the Twitter Search API and defined a Twitter hashtag – #Malta09 for the field course.

Students could then tweet using #Malta09 about their experiences in the field during the day together with a latitude and longitude (provided either by their mobile phone or GPS receivers the students were using to accomplish their fieldwork tasks) and these tweets would be swept up by a web map and displayed on the web.

This map was also available to students back in London and it was anticipated that students who had travelled to Malta previously (current 3rd years) and those that would travel the following year (current 1st years) would interact with those on the field course.

Staff also tweeted regularly throughout the day commenting on various aspects of the field course.

All of the elements of the experiment worked perfectly with one small exception. The Twitter searching functioned flawlessly at the time (but the search parameters have since been reduced to 7 days meaning the original data is no longer directly accessible), the web mapping and interaction with staff and students back in London also worked flawlessly.

Students in Malta however were reluctant to tweet which seems largely based on the high international roaming charges they were exposed to on their mobile phones. While the staff were able to offer inducements in the form of refunds of mobile phone usage and the students also had access to WIFI in the hotel in the evenings most were reluctant to tweet about their experiences and only a few students commented from the field on their final day.

We’ll be repeating the experiment this year and reinforcing the cost inducements and hopefully last summer’s free European roaming promotion from Vodafone UK will see other carriers making similar promotions this year which might lessen the financial impact.

There are also plans to trial the field course tweets with students in other UK and international locations throughout the coming academic year to examine if cost or other factors (such as wishing to keep social and learning spaces separate) are the driving reasons.

Other issues surrounding relying on “Cloud Computing” infrastructure for important data storage were highlighted when Twitter modified their search API without notification.