Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and quality of student work during the exercises. This visualization was via an
online map that underpinned the collaboration. It was intended to act as a spatial
reference to improve student familiarity with an unfamiliar environment as well as
mapping the locations of student groups, and visualizing productivity of student
groups within their study areas. A communication method was required and the
project made use of two: TxtTools a University implemented bulk SMS sending
and receiving application and the Twitter microblogging service. Twitter enabled
us to demonstrate how spatially referenced asynchronous and spatially distant
collaboration can take place through this medium. The underlying map is used as a
basis for discussion and consensus building and as a visualization aid.
Cook (
2010
) demonstrates a simple version of this observation and discussion
with a small group of students using mobile phones as boundary objects (after
Beddall-Hill and Raper (
2010
)). In our implementation the students use mobile
phones as a communication medium for mediation via Twitter. They incorporate
the camera functionality of their phones for sharing images of landuse to clarify
contested concepts and make use of PDAs to map their environment as well as to
gather spatial coordinates to accompany observations. We developed a Twitter
map as a collaborative application medium enabling real-time, staff monitored
communication to develop a common conceptual understanding in support of data
capture.
4 Methodology
Student fieldwork often reflects the way in which geographically dispersed teams
or individuals work (similar to the process of geodeliberation and the applications
for collaboratories). The first ''TweetMap'' displaying the tweets over a map was
built as a mechanism to explore the value of using social networking as a
mechanism for collaborative learning using #uksnow map as a framework (Marsh
2009
).
The 2009 iteration of the fieldcourse (Field and O'Brien
2010b
) utilized a beta
release of the map (Fig.
1
) with student and staff feedback used to enhance the
design of the interface and types of data displayed on the map. Issues identified
through user feedback included how to deal with coincident tweets, how to
manage threaded discussions and how to link tweets discussing similar concepts.
These improvements were incorporated into the 2010 version of the map.
User feedback from the AGI Geocommunity 2009 conference confirmed psy-
chological and visualization theories that a Twitter avatar provided a good marker
symbol and that a visual timeline emphasized the temporal dimension of tweets
improving spatial and temporal representation within the TweetMap (Field and
O'Brien
2010a
).
The students used the map as part of their data collection workflow during
2 days in the study area. The first day was a largely unstructured exercise where
the students were given brief instructions about the need to map the landuse of the
