What is the nature, scope and role of cases in this setting?
Environmental Education at LJMU encompasses a wide range of disciplines, with modules offered by departmental staff being taken by students on programmes as diverse as Outdoor Education and Physical Geography. The department is part of the Centre for Sport, Dance, and Outdoor Education. It maintains close academic links with these other subjects, and students can specialize in Physical Education, Geography/Environmental Education, or Adventure Tourism. Students engage both in outdoor pursuits and academic work relating to the environment in which these activities take place, with most staff members active in both these areas too.
In the ‘Glacial and Fluvial Processes’ module, students are encouraged not only to study illustrative cases (e.g. data from field trips to illustrate certain climatic and geomorphological phenomena) but also to build cases of their own, based on their independent interpretations of the available data, and to deliver the kind of opinions that an expert in their field may be called on to deliver ‘real world’ situations.
How are cases designed, developed, described and reconstructed?
Cases were already in use in Environmental Education as fieldwork studies, and previous online tools developed for the course were primarily aimed at pre and post-fieldwork study, with students having the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the site beforehand and to gather extra information about it both before and after their visit. Data is assembled from a variety of sources, including the teacher’s own photo archive, online sources of climatic, fluvial and geological data, and academic readings related to these processes.
What new tools have been developed and how?
The teacher’s participation in the design process has indicated that the prototype site, initially created using only the established Ensemble/Simile technologies, could usefully be structured around an open-source ontology. Developments of the tool are continuing to explore the possibilities this offers.
What are the pedagogical advantages and opportunities of using semantic technologies?
Students on the ‘Glacial and Fluvial Processes’ module have to be able to interpret and forms links between evidence gathered from diverse forms of data, ranging from photographs, maps, and charts to climatic data and geological samples. Previous online resources and study tasks designed and provided by the tutor had certain organisational constraints on how students could view data, not allowing them to directly compare like datasets from different sources (e.g. images of the same glacial scenery, or climatic datasets, from two different sites), or different datasets from the same location (e.g. photographs and climatic data from the same fieldwork site). Using sematic technologies as a means of access to these datasets liberates students from these constraints, and enables them to manipulate data, and use the online resource to formulate links and hypotheses in a more flexible way than they have previously been able to do. This potential was immediately recognised by the course tutor, who took the opportunity to restructure the assessment task to take into account these additional possibilities, and to make it more appealing to the students’ desire for authentic tasks.
There are also various purely practical advantages to using semantic technologies for ‘virtual fieldwork’, including allowing access to restricted sites, and widening participation among the student body.
Demos
The prototype HEP task at LJMU: http://ensemble.ljmu.ac.uk/projects/settings/outdoor/HEP/
