I developed the tour materials into an experiment which I discuss in a blog post. I produced a tour best practices paper which I converted to two blog posts; 1 and 2.

A description of the project can be seen 58:10 into this video clip by myself.

I collaborated in the project with Paula Engelbrecht of Ordnance Survey UK.

Every year 300+ 1st year students take an introductory course in Oceanography (Soes1008) from backgrounds as varied as Oceanographers to Law students. Part of the course is a set of practicals (all of which have been produced by myself) which are delivered in distance learning mode since it is logistically very difficult to run multiple practical sessions for them all.

The materials were customised kml files from the Nasa Visualization Studio and they use the advanced timeline control in Google Earth to show the spread of warm water in the Pacific during an El Nino episode.

More details in this blog post

Research Network
The central aim of this pilot study is to have the cognitive psychologists work with the software developer and geography team to design a pilot project and analyse the use of multimedia in enhancing field teaching.
We have also run two advisors' meetings where a number of geographers, geologists, education experts and representatives from industry discussed the project and how it would proceed.

The Fieldwork Problem
Students from a range of disciplines often benefit from teaching in situ rather that being taught solely in a classroom situation, examples could be an engineer working in a factory, a trainee teacher having classroom experience and geographers working in the environment (field work). Field work is expensive and time consuming to organise, it is therefore important to get the maximum benefit from the experience. There are many studies where TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) is used in the classroom before or after a fieldwork event to enhance learning or is used to aid field data gathering. By comparison the use of multimedia in the field has not been widely studied and this is the basis of our pilot project.
In our situation TEL could be most usefully used to help visualise a 2 or 3 dimensional environmental concept, for example, sea level has risen around the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England over the last 10,000 years leading to a change in the position of the coast. The rate of sea level rise has also changed significantly within this period with a rapid rise from 10,000 to 7,000 ybp (years before present) and a much slower rise from 7,000 ybp to present. This concept is difficult to explain to students with the use of static diagrams and but an animation of sea level rise over 10,000 years offers students a richer experience.

Choice of Hardware
Most projects using TEL in the field choose to use mobile hardware such as Palm Tops, iPods or mobile phones. These devices have the obvious advantage of portability and screen brightness designed to cope with outdoor viewing. However, they have the disadvantages of special software design requirements, small screen size and limited user interfaces. Developments in e-paper and the physical reduction in the size of computers generally suggests that these disadvantages may disappear in the near future. This led us to select PC tablets as hardware for the students to use.
The tablets were to be connected to a GPS and using a software package the viewers location could be shown on an aerial photography background. Students would be guided by the GPS indicator to a number of locations where they would view visualisation content on the tablets. The choice of tablets we had access to proved problematic, they were proven to work for field data collection purposes as far as battery power, screen brightness and portability were concerned. The animations we used required the user to be able to distinguish subtle colour variations on screen that required more screen brightness than was available.
The solution was to split the experiment into two parts, the tablets would be attached to a GPS and used in a mobile manner in a mapping exercise. Laptops would be used in a fixed location in shades to deliver an activity based around visualisations. This second ‘field kiosk’ idea got over the triple problems of lack of robustness, screen brightness and poor portability of the laptops.

Choice of Software
To deliver our visualisation we originally planned to use Google Earth. This is free virtual globe software that can be used to help students orient themselves. For example, it was possible to capture a movie clip of the ‘flight’ zooming up from the location of the kiosks by the coast to a bird’s eye view of the Isle of Wight where students could see an animation of sea level rise with time. The flight aids students because they do not have to resolve the scale and orientation of the map, they understand that intuitively from the flight. The visualisation lent itself to a narrative rather than an exploratory presentation, a number of story elements built on each other to finally lead to conceptual understanding rather than a series of loosely connected story elements explored independently of one another. However, Google Earth is limited in the control software developers can exert over the interface design, a prototype was tested on users and proved difficult to operate.
To cope with this problem delivery was switched to a movie clip, the animations were captured using Google Earth Pro and Camtasia and were spliced together using Camtasia software. Students played the movie on the laptops within the chine and answered questions on a paper handout. As a control, other students were given just paper handouts with text and illustrations replacing the animations.

Other Logistical Problems
Fitting our study around an existing field trip proved problematic in a number of ways. Experimenting on students when it possibly impacts on their final marks has ethical implications that needed considering. We also had to fit into a week long field trip schedule and negotiate what teaching on chines could take place to students before the experiment. Managing multiple students all at one time is also difficult.
We also suffered hardware thefts leading up to the experiment that caused delays.

Results
The student day ran successfully with 2 groups of students taking part in the experiment. In Shepherd's chine students reported no problems with operating the laptops and preliminary analysis shows they approved of the animations. They specifically liked the way that using a laptop made them work together on the exercise, this was an unpredicted advantage of using the laptops in pairs. Test results on the students using the laptops and a control group using a paper alternative proved no conclusive advantage to the students using laptops, however, with the limited numbers of students used in this study this is not surprising.
In Grange chine students were given experience using the tablets connected to the GPS which showed a red dot at their location. Operating the tablets went well, with no operation problems. Students commented that they found the tablet useful, in a questionnaire more of them would have used the tablet than paper if they had the choice. Where they had reservations, it was due to screen brightness which limited the use of the tablet as we had predicted. They also commented that using the tablet and GPS would have been more useful in a larger scale study area because the 10m error of the GPS meant they could fix their position in the chine better by examining the map rather than the GPS icon on the tablet.

Conclusions
Preliminary analysis shows that students appreciate visualisations in the field as a way of helping them understand 3D landform problems. Working as a pair attached to a laptop appears to have advantages in the communication it brings about between students. All the hardware and software operated satisfactorily in the field with no break downs or major problems.
To continue the study our first priority is to acquire a specialist PC tablet which would have a bright screen, be capable of running graphic heavy animations, be moderately portable and robust. This would combine the obvious advantage of the real time positioning information we tested in Grange chine with the visualisations possible using Google Earth or similar programs as tested in Shepherd's chine. We attempted to acquire such hardware mid project when the tablet screen brightness problem first became apparent but it became clear that such equipment is difficult to hire, expensive to buy and must be tested properly before being chosen.
We also think improvements could be made by avoiding running experiments on existing field trips, this would avoid any logistical need to fit in terms of study topic, ethics and timing. We have a better idea of how to use software in producing our visualisations and have also learnt valuable lessons about designing assessments for students. There is also a need for more testing as the project proceeds including a full dress rehearsal, such testing was not possible in this project because of the limited budget and time.

One of the beauties of Moodle is that unlike VLEs such as Blackboard or WebCT you get 'under the hood' and customise it. By accessing databases within Moodle using php I produced an output that can be read by Google Earth i.e. in kml format. This enabled students to fill in tables in Moodle including latitude and longitude and to see the results appear on a map.

Since I completed the experiment other tools have appeared that do this much better but it shows the potential of mashups between Moodle and other programs.

More Details

This project was done in Flash as a way of teaching myself simple multimedia, the film clip below shows the most complex programming part: by clicking and dragging a 'ball' the user could create an earthquake and see the result at the seismometer on the right. Clicking the green squares created larger earthquakes at the different locations.