The philosophy and design of a
Virtual Field Course
David J. Unwin
Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
A student field course, in which a class is taken for a week or more field
instruction away from the home institution to work on a variety of
geographical problems, is an established feature of geography programmes in
UK and elsewhere and in several other disciplines. It is intended to
address a variety of educational aims, and is in many respects similar to
laboratory work in physical science. Increased student numbers and a
decline in the teaching resources available make it imperative that field
courses are seen to be efficient and effective. To most, this implies
embedding them better into the curriculum, with greater emphasis on
preparation, debriefing and the kinds of work that currently simply cannot
be accomplished in the lecture theatre or inside laboratory.
Our virtual field course (VFC) plans to use GIS, multi-media, visualisation
and virtual reality software to create a digital environment in which
students can re-create landscapes, generate sample data, and access
knowledge about the chosen areas. The uses of such a system are many, and
almost all involve enhancement of the existing field programmes.
The paper describes an approach to be adopted by a joint Birkbeck,
Leicester and Oxford team to engineer together a software toolkit for the
creation of VFCs. In educational terms, the work involves a clear
specification of the aims, objectives and styles of field work. In software
the problem is essentially one of integrating components which already
exist in public domain. Finally, there is a need to provide rich,
non-copyright spatial and other data to act as a demonstrator for the
concept.
More about this project can be found at http://www.geog.le.ac.uk/vfc.
Outline of talk as presented September 7, 1996
Two anecdotes
- Steven Mann at MIT
- combat aircraft pilots
Some morals to be drawn
The virtual field course
- a collection of hardware, software tools to address learning objectives of the same type as in the real world but in a digital virtual world
What it might provide
- map access to a rich multi-media data base
- a student interrogation system
- a note taking facility
- data entry and modification
- landscape visualisation in `interpreted views'
- a point/line/area query facility
Educational Contexts
- enhancing field work before, during and after the event itself
- extending field work into physically challenging, remote or otherwise expensive regions
- perhaps replacement for differently-abled students
Similar Work
Technical problems and decisions
- choice of tools
- WWW delivery is essential
- VRML
- JAVA applets
- GRASS as GIS
The role of Immersion
- `Through the window' approach but with an immersive VR experiment
The need for demonstrators
-
Dartmoor
- North Norfolk
- the World?
David J. Unwin
Department of Geography
Birkbeck College
University of London
7-15 Gresse Street,
London W1P 2LL
FAX +44 171 631 6498
D.UNWIN@geog.bbk.ac.uk