Mobilising Remote Student Engagement

At the beginning of the MoRSE project a survey of students personal technologies was undertaken to provide a baseline for the project and it was interesting to note that most students students believe that mobile phones can support their learning in a variety of ways:

- Kingston University Personal Technologies Survey

- De Montfort University Personal Technologies Survey

During the period of the project mobile and personal technologies have continued to develop at a significant rate, as demonstrated by the rapid increase in the range and type of smart phones on the market and the new generation touch screen tablets that have emerged since the beginning of the project. This has been coupled by the growth of the mobile application “App” market, development of 3G mobile infrastructure and new regulations introduced in the EU covering roaming charges.  These developments will no doubt have impact on the type of personal technologies that students own and the way that they will use them to support their learning.  However it is likely that it will be heterogeneous mix of technologies and probably very fragmented.  Therefore it is probably important to focus on the learning and those technologies that are widely and freely available running across multiple platforms.  It is worth noting that some of the key technologies used as part of this project have been around for many years including RSS (geo-RSS), SMS and MMS and continue to provide a baseline to contributing from devices that today would be considered basic.

Four field guides for  Geography students (and staff) to support the use of mobile and personal technologies on fieldtrips have been developed.  These are available below:

- Introduction to Personal Technologies on Field Trips Guide

- Mapping Photographs and other Resources Guide

- Sharing Photographs Guide

- Georeferencing Photographs Guide

Like the desktop/server/mobile demo a few people have expressed an interest in how the geocollaborative Twitter map was used in our landuse survey exercises. A demo was presented at the 2009 Esri User Conference in San Diego and you can view it here.

A few people expressed an interest in seeing how we set up the data and how we went from desktop to server and to mobile. Here’s a Captivate demo of 98% of the process (sans the sync back to the Server) from the original Isle of Wight testing phase.

The live test with mobile devices on the Isle of Wight to a server located in Kingston worked flawlessly. Unfortunately the ArcPad 8.0 desktop client didn’t demonstrate that functionality well.

Recent  live demos using  ArcPad 10 and PDA screen sharing software do demonstrate that the technique works flawlessly (even on a portable server) as demonstrated at the 2010 AGI GeoCommunity event.