Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 4 Fieldwork
geocollaboratory architecture
As students surveyed their allocated areas they utilized Twitter and twitpic (via
multimedia message service) to communicate with staff about technical issues often
with advice from other students, deliberated about data collection and sampling
strategies before settling on a common approach which was disseminated using
Twitter. A summary of the students' discussions are presented in the Results below.
The geocollaboratory links multiple web map services (using Google Maps
TM
API and Esri
ArcGIS
Server Javascript API), a social network (Twitter) and
other services to visualize the content of tweets and any threaded discussions
taking place (Fig.
4
).
The outputs of this geocollaboratory are centered on the ''TweetMap'' which
spatially (or temporally) references tweets from the Twitter API overlaid on data
from the map services.
We utilized Twitter as our primary communication medium in preference to
other social networking tools as earlier surveys of students (Linsey et al.
2010a
)
indicated a desire for students to keep personal and ''professional'' social networks
separate (most students did not have pre-existing Twitter accounts) and the 140
character limit of Twitter forced students to have focussed discussions. This survey
also indicated that all students on the trip had a mobile device capable of sending
Twitter messages (either posting messages directly to their Twitter account
through a web interface or indirectly as an SMS message through a third party
application) minimizing 3G data costs.
The 2010 collaborative map used the Twitter API search function to find the
#malta10 (an abbreviation for the Kingston University 2010 Malta field course)
hashtag to denote content related to the fieldwork activities. The map illustrates
