Juicy Geography Mobile

WayFinder Earth

2006-05-03T21:44:00.000Z

Obviously when out moblogging, it's nice to know where you are. WayFinder Earth beta appears to offer the most complete and user friendly mapping application for a mobile phone. I've written a short review on Digital Geography.

Horner Water field trip

2006-04-24T19:30:00.000Z

I managed to moblog a couple of pictures from todays' field trip before the phone signal somewhat predicatably vanished. Other photos were queued up, and I posted them later in the day from the phone.

Todays' pictures from Exmoor

Stoke Pero Woods, Exmoor

Phone 2GEarth seemed to work very well. I recorded a track during the day but unfortunately forgot to clear an old one from my phone. I'll remember to do that next time! Recording placemarks in Google Earth using the phone was fine, and I've added some pictures to the placemarks, which can be downloaded as one Google Earth file here.

Using the GPS was not quite as successful. My unit, a Garmin Etrex Vista, found it very hard to acquire a signal in the steep sided woodlands of Exmoor. Although I did record quite a lot of data I've found out that when measuring valley gradients, you really have to record the angle over 100m rather than 10m in order to get meaningful results. Maybe a traditional gun clinometer is slightly more practical, apart from situations where you have an open view of the sky, and enough time to take measurements over a fair distance. Sand dune transects are ideal for GPS work as I've already found out. I didn't get the students to use the handheld GPS as there wasn't enough time on this occasion. A final barrier to successful use of GPS is the perennial problem of downloading individual tracks from a handheld GPS. I have yet to encounter a really efficient method of doing this, although I'm going to give Easy GPS a try soon.

First Yellow Arrows

2006-04-23T19:01:00.000Z

I have added the first of my Yellow Arrows to two locations in North Devon that are important to me. The others will be used in a Geography/Art collaboration project.

This is the very first arrow:

There are lots of surf shops in North Devon, the arrow is placed on the window of the only shop manufacturing surfboards locally. If you're in Braunton, text the code on the arrow to the SMS number provided, for a personal message!

This arrow has been placed somewhere on the beach. I'm not saying which beach, or where the arrow is located, but it's not hard to find! There's a message for weekend / London surfers to be discovered.

Tomorrow I will be moblogging directly from a GCSE fieldtrip on Exmoor, (providing there's an Orange signal!) I will also be testing some handheld GPS units and Phone2GEarth as well. The idea is to use the the phone to locate and photograph the fieldwork sites. The phone images will be geotagged in the evening.

The moblog link is here

The handheld GPS units will be used in conjunction with a traditional gun clinometer to measure the gradient of the river bed and the valley sides. The results will be available from digital geography in .gpx format so that they can be viewed in GPS Visualizer. It will be interesting to evaluate the accuracy of the traditional method compared to the modern.

Mobile technologies and fieldwork

2006-04-18T21:00:00.000Z

The holiday has ended and it's time to get on with proper work. This term I will be undertaking at least two fieldwork projects with students using some of the ideas from this blog.

I'm going to be working on a cross-curricular collaboration with Art. We're going to use Yellow Arrows to identify environmental artworks by Year 9 in the school grounds. The artworks will have a Yellow Arrow to label their location, and by texting the unique code on each arrow, pupils will be able to use their phones to find out more about the art and maybe start a location-based discussion. We might create a Blogger page to publish this work.

Next week I'm going to use the Phone2GEarth application I mentioned in my previous post to identify the fieldwork sites during our GCSE rivers investigation. We'll be using Google Earth to track our progress during the day, and hopefully produce some nice geotagged images as well. I'm trying out PhotoRite to improve the quality of my camera phone images, and it seems to work very well.

I'm going to continue to use my phone for assessment for learning, getting students to talk about their work, without actually being in the camera view. This was a very successful experiment from last term, and I'm going to try it out with Year 10s during their fieldwork. I've found a new phone application, ETI CamCorder 2 that improves the quality of the mobile video and outputs a file that doesn't need to be converted in order to play on a PC.

In other mobile phone related news, Tony Cassidy has published some ideas for using mobile phones as revison aids, and Hans Hoekstra posted a comment on digital geography about an interesting task for Year 7's where students compared mobile phone signal strength and population density.

Phone 2 Google Earth

2006-04-16T17:08:00.000Z

This evening I went for a bike ride and tried out a little application called "Phone 2 Google Earth"
It all worked very well. The program discovers a bluetooth GPS and then records your position for as long as required. It then saves the data as a KML file, which can be transferred from the phone to a PC. Here is the Google Earth file of my ride. The llamas featured as a placemark can be seen on the moblog here.

An internet of things

2006-04-13T11:39:00.000Z

I've been investigating Semacode today and wrote a short article on Juicy Geography on how semacode tags could be used as part of a fieldwork exercise. Tags could for example, link a public art piece to the artist's blog or an online conversation about the work. With a smart phone you can link the virtual world to a physical location or object, hence an "internet of things"

How geographical is that?

I'm off now to place a semacode tag. I'll post the coordinates and pictures of the tag on the moblog within the next hour. Anyone finding the tag will be able to use it to find out more about the sport that takes place at the location.

Community walk

2006-04-12T19:26:00.000Z

A great idea for a field work exercise is to get students to map their part of the world. Community Walk provides a modern solution.

I took a short stroll around my house today, taking pictures on the phone and uploading them to the moblog. The link below takes you to a Community Walk map of the route.
A map of my Spring walk

A simple, blog-friendly version is below:

A Community Walk map can display detailed information and directions to that location, as well as links to image and video files. There are any number of possibilities for fieldwork projects with a social or cultural theme.

The next post will look at a way of linking actual and virtual locations, by exploring a simple method for hyperlinking physical places to the internet. The web is all around us, even on the walls!

Setting up a Moblog

2006-04-12T19:05:00.000Z

In this post I'll quickly go through the steps required to get pictures and text from your mobile phone onto the internet, free of charge.

First you need a blog. It doesn't have to be a Blogger account, but this option is probably the quickest and easiest choice.

Next go to Flickr and set up an account there if you don't already have one. Flickr is a wonderful photo-sharing site with dozens of excellent features and it quickly becomes addicitive. You can set your Flickr account so that you can upload photos by email. By registering on Flickr, you can also have your uploaded pictures posted directly onto your blog. More information here. Remarkable considering the respective empires behind the two sites, but nevertheless it all works suprisingly well.

That's it really. You're moblogging and no doubt starting to consider the possibilities for mobile-enabled fieldtips. Imagine students using their phone to plot their position on a Google map* They can collect data images and video on their phone, and share their results instantly over the internet. New possibilities for location-based conversations, based on tagging and Google map mash-ups like Community Walk are possible. Speaking of Community Walk, that's the topic for the next post.

(*coming soon in the UK hopefully)

Moblogging requirements

2006-04-12T18:31:00.000Z

In this post I'll briefly describe the equipment I'm using.

Firstly you need a phone. Any email-enabled camera phone will do, if all you require is the ability to send photographs to Flickr. I needed the functionality of a smart phone, (I'll explain why in future posts). After doing some research, I picked the Nokia 6630. It 's discontinued, and therefore available cheaply on E Bay; though in the end I brought a reconditioned handset from the Orange web site. Although it looks a bit silly, (a Body Glove case sorts that out) the phone has every concievable feature, and the Symbian 60 series operating system, which means that it can run a variety of useful software including 3D Tracking.

The phone is all you need for moblogging, though to track your position, you'll also need a bluetooth GPS. I brought a cheap BT77 unit from E Bay. Compared to a traditional hand-held GPS, like the Garmin Etrex, the unit is tiny and yet more powerful, you can turn it on, stick it in your pocket and forget its there. The Bluetooth connection works extremely well with the phone.

This is all the hardware I'm using. In the next post I'll run through how I set this blog up as a moblog.

3D Tracking

2006-04-12T18:22:00.000Z

So where exactly have you been?

3DTracking is a small application that sits on your phone and communicates with a bluetooth- enabled GPS. At regular intervals it records the location of the phone, and then goes online and uploads the information to a remote server. When you return to base, simply log onto the website, and see where you've been on a Google map or in Google Earth.

The service also works in real-time, is completely user-friendly and best of all, it's completely free to use.
You need a suitable mobile phone and a GPS unit. I'll cover that in the next post.

About Juicy Geography Mobile

2006-04-12T16:36:00.000Z

I'm using this blog to study the feasibility of mobile technologies for geography fieldwork. Everything in the moblog has been published directly from my phone.

This section of the blog will cover the technology, and thoughts on how it can be utilized effectively. I'll also feature useful websites and mobile-enabled maps.