I was just clearing up my office at the end of semester when I realise I had to deal with a thick pile of field reports. These were submitted by the students who went to the Hanoi fieldtrip with me in December 2009 and I must say I am very pleased with the academic quality of the reports. Perhaps I am blessed with a good cohort of students but I believe it has to do with the way I designed the course AAG401. Although a 1-hour per week slot has always been allocated for the course before the students go for the fieldtrip, I have made these 1 hour slots even more tructured then before. I have set milestones for them to complete namely:

1. Conduct a prelimiary literature review
2. Formulating the research question
3. Concept mapping the ideas around the research topic.
4. Write a litearture review on methodology
5. Write a proposed methodology chapter
6. Design a field guide book

At each stage, 3 steps were taken: Peer reivew of the milestone product by one classmate, review of the product by me and then a revision which was then uploaded onto the CMS - BlackBoard.

I think this forces the student to pace their fieldwork and research and allows them to spend more time on data analysis and then writing after the fieldtrip itself.

While I am generally staisfied with this approach I think a few improvements can be made in future runs:

1. Include a similar process for the post-fieldwork sessions, especially on data analysis.
2. Have an oral presentation before the submission of the final product to allow for reflection

I have gathered some reflections from the students but I shall not post them here. Most of them have indicated that being in the field itself allows them to see the geographical phenomena they are studying from a very differen perspective. They have also learnt that a lot of field investigation depends on the site and even with the most comprehensive planning, some degree of improvisiation is required. At some point, I will collect these reflections and share them in an article. For the moment, I should write these thoughts down before they get eroded by time.

I recall a very engaging session at the AAG where Professor Sarah Bednarz and her team used the mATSI inventory to assess student attitudes to human Geography. I just read up on it and created a modified mATSI, sort of a mmASTI to study the attitudes of teachers using Web 2.0 for teaching and learning Geography. If you are a Geography teaching and using Web 2.0, you may help me by completing this survey at:

Click HERE for survey

Your helkp will be much appreciated.

Here are some photographs from the past few days. Enjoy.

LINK

I have finally presented my papers at the paper session on Mobile Devices and Fieldbased learning on Geography and the panel session on climate change education initiatives with the AAG. What's interesting is the networking rather than the paper presentations. Apparently, someone who attended my sessions went on to tell their colleague about my work and they came looking for me to talk about theirs. Small world even for a conference with over 8000 attendees. Well, I used the opportunity to publicise the SEAGA meeting in Hanoi. Let's hope that the meeting in Hanoi will be a sucessful one.

Check out the photos here.

Click this LINK.