Tools for Students Doing Mobile Fieldwork

Abstract

Students are not always sitting at their desk when learning new things – they are also out in the world. The authors present a set of tools they developed to support groups of students who are doing field studies. Initially, the authors gave the students a Wiki for gathering field notes and their group work material. Based on observations on how they used it and collaborated, they developed additional tools to run along with the Wiki. These include a mobile application for capturing data (photo, video, audio, and text) and automatically uploading to the Wiki, and a set of Web tools which run on top of the Wiki for increasing the awareness between students, and for browsing the captured data. They describe the implementation of these tools and report on the experience from having students using them on their own equipment during the course.