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Faculty Mini-Grant 6: Art Trese
Digital Media in the Great Outdoors
Digital Media in the Great Outdoors
Dr. Arthur Trese, Associate Professor
Environmental and Plant Biology, Ohio University
593-0260, trese@ohio.edu
Purpose and Rationale: Employing digital media outside the classroom.
As in instructor in both large section non-majors and upper level majors biology courses, I have found the ability to bring life science content alive in the classroom through the power of digital media to be a fantastic teaching tool. Furthermore, digital media systems can be enhanced to allow interactive student involvement in the classroom, ranging from Personal Response Systems to web based tutorials, practice questions, even individually paced progression through complex Flash animations. Of course, all of this requires that the classroom be outfitted with appropriate presentation hardware. In essence, multimedia capability makes it possible to "bring biology alive" in the classroom. And yet, one of the most powerful tools for engaging students in sciences, from biology to geography, is to take them to where the science isÉ outside the classroom. Few classroom experience can match a well designed field trip, be it to a woods, a stream side, a nursery, local farm, arboretum, museum or a coal mine.
And yet field trips, in my experience, typically fall short of their potential to provide a superior learning experience for students for these reasons:
- difficulty in group management; students enjoy distracting each other
- clear communication with all students is often challenging, increasingly so if the group size is large, students walk slowly, seemingly instinctively sensing that if they go slow, they will cover less material. Field trips can often involve far more time walking and waiting than observing, discussing, and learning
- field trips often are a difficult environment for students to take notes, both in the writing aspect, and the difficulty in hearing what is being said.
- material being investigated is often relatively small, or perhaps just one example is present, and as students gather, only a few students in front can actually see the instructor. Students can rotate to the front, and the instructor can repeat the description/explanation several times, but this simply leaves other students to loiter about
- frequently, not all the material to be covered in a given field trip is in its best conditionÉ too old, too young, not flowering, hard to reach, rare and protected, maybe even missing that day. Less than ideal material is then often discounted, with statements on the order of "Later this year, these will be much more impressive, or noticeable, or important..."
- as a result of many of the above, students have "learned" that in many cases they are not actually responsible for most of the material covered during field trips, giving the impression that field trips are really "a day off", reinforcing the problems in A and B above,
This proposal seeks to address many of these issues with technology, combining the utility of digital multimedia and interactivity possible in the classroom with the filed trip event. The concept is that the instructor will posses a tablet PC, such as the Panasonic Toughbook 18, capable of displaying the same digital media that might be used in a classroom, along with wireless connectivity. The tablet PC will be designed for the rugged use expected on field trips. This includes water resistant, shock resistant drives and connectors, dust and dirt resistant, shock resistant mounting for the LCD display, sealed ports and keyboard. Additionally, the LCD display has a TFT anti-reflection active matrix display (Oh yeah!) that makes it useable even in full daylight conditions. http://www.ruggedlaptops.us/panasonic_toughbook/toughbook_18.html and http://www.toughbooksales.com/tb_18.asp
Each student would have a wireless digital tablet display, essentially the display from the Toughbook tablet PC, sans the drives and keyboard. The tablet wireless display is also military spec. rugged for filed use, equivalent to the tablet PC. (See NEW 10.4" Toughbook Wireless Display at http://www.toughbooksales.com/ ) These tablet displays would allow students to view digital content displayed on the tablet PC and listen to audio through headphone jacks. Conceptually, the instructor would be able to present a variety of digital media sources to students, even speak to the students through a microphone pickup. If the laptop PC has server software installed, each wireless display becomes interactive, and the students could annotate content at will, take handwritten notes, browse web pages, and instructor could collect feedback or perform interactive assessment throughout field trip. If the field trip involved collecting and analyzing data, (potentially even group work) with a server configuration, this could be accommodated easily.
Some examples of unique content delivery possible with this combination of PC and displays include: high resolution close up images, images of material (organisms) at other life cycle stages not present at the time of field trip, images of organisms that interact but are not present at time of field trip (e.g. Monarch butterfly larva) high quality video or time lapse video related to setting, and anything on the web.
Typically field trips are restricted to courses that enroll relatively small numbers of students. I would anticipate the first applications of the technology described in this proposal in such advanced level courses. When it comes to large section courses, I do not design field trip experiences into my courses because I can not lead 12 separate field trips, of 20 students each, in a single week. Considering that field trips are a challenge for experienced instructors, I don't desire to assign field trips to Teaching Assistants, and would hesitate to test students on content from a field trip if it were led by a several different TAs; as many as 12 times in a week. This proposal may provide an avenue whereby a TA could effectively lead a field trip, engage the students, and present a consistent experience for students, because they would be following a set content delivery. If a server configuration were employed, the TA could potentially collect student responses (identifiable to student) to assess student's participation and learning as an integral part of the field trip experience.
Investigative process:
This proposal seeks to initiate an exploration of the potential of a tablet PC and remote wireless display to provide effective presentation of digital media in the field. The scale of this proposal will be one Toughbook 18 tablet PC and one wireless digital display. These units will be purchased primarily with other funds. As a science content instructor, I will team with a graduate student in the College of Education (specific student TBA, Teresa Franklin has a candidate in mind, but I don't have confirmation at the present time) to develop and deploy various formats of digital media in the field. We will investigate web browsing, PowerPoint, text, and video content under field conditions. In essence, we will build "field trip" content, and experiment with the variables of actual implementation. I will also work with Frank Carano, staff at Alden Library in charge of classroom digital technology, to investigate the potential to scale the delivery to server mode in the future, which would provide the added benefit of interactivity.
Description of Activities and Timeline:
The tablet PC and wireless display will be purchased by the end of June 2006. Over the summer and fall content development and experimenting with delivery and interactivity will be the focus. In the spring of 2007, an NSF proposal will be formulated, submitted to the Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Instruction panel. Other granting agencies and venues will also be considered. In the NSF proposal the goal will be to purchase a set of twenty wireless remote displays, and to implement the field trip content produced and refined with the aid of this SEOCEMS grant. Ideally, other faculty will be recruited to make most effective use of the technology. Virtually any course content could be packaged and delivered "in-the-field", from museum trips to architecture courses, depending on the needs of the instructor. One possible long-term implementation of the technology would have the library checking out the tablet PC and as many wireless displays as needed by any instructor or TA. This would provide the most extensive applications.
Plan for assessing project's effectiveness: As this is a preliminary investigation into the feasibility and utility of the technology, without a direct use in a classroom setting, at this stage, there is limited means of assessing effectiveness. The NSF proposal I envision would have an explicit plan to compare, from a large section course, control groups of students on a traditional field trip format, and students using digital multimedia technology. The technology would also be used in smaller, advanced classes that I teach that have an emphasis on field trips as a major aspect of the course structure. There may also be an opportunity to trial the technology at the High School science level.
Plan for Disseminating Findings:
Findings will be disseminated at a science education meeting, to be determined, with the assistance of Teresa Franklin and others.
Funded Budget
Total: $3,000.00
