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Abstract
Although fieldwork is always cited as an important component of geographic education, there are many obstacles for executing high school fieldwork. Mobile electronic products are becoming popular and some schools are able to acquire these devices for mobile learning. This study attempts to provide a mobile-assisted means of guiding students through fieldwork without a teacher’s presence. To explore these possibilities, a PDA (personal digital assistant) program, referred to as the Pocket Fieldwork Assistant (PFA), has been developed. A fieldwork course module that is concerned with local irrigation ditch issues is designed and implemented to evaluate how the PFA affects fieldwork learning in authentic settings.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Tsung-Te Wu who contributed the GPS function set and Yen-Chuan Chou who gave us technical support. We are also indebted to the two high schools, Chi-Jen High School and Taipei Municipal Lishan High
School, their teachers and students, that were involved in our research experiment
Tzu-Yen Hsu is a graduate student in the Department of Geography at National Taiwan Normal University. Her main interests include mobile learning, geographic information systems (GIS), and Web applications. Che-Ming Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at National Taiwan Normal University. His teaching and research interests focus on geographic education assisted by information technology, such as geographic information systems (GIS) and multimedia.
Notes
1. The PFA demo: http://elearning.geo.ntnu.edu.tw/liugong/pfa/index.html
2. The PFA executable file: http://elearning.geo.ntnu.edu.tw/liugong/pda/LiugongFT.exe
3. The PFA source code: http://elearning.geo.ntnu.edu.tw/liugong/pfa/PFASourceCode.rar