Digital fieldwork with Fieldmove - how do digital tools influence geoscience students’ learning experience in the field?

Abstract

Third year geoscience students were introduced to digital tools for fieldwork, Fieldmove on iPads, in a capstone field mapping course at Oslo University, Norway. Despite little prior experience with digital tools for fieldwork, they became independent Fieldmove users in a few hours. They self-report positive cognitive impacts, including positive effects on quality of fieldwork, maps and reports. However, submitted course material suggest students achieved similar levels of understanding with and without digital tools. We hypothesize that students’ confidence in their work increases when supported by digital tools, however, they may also overrate their proficiency due to the ease of collecting large data sets, and the professional look of the digital outputs. Students report both positive and negative effects on teamwork; observations suggest this reflects sharing of devices rather than use of digital tools per se. The students also report pronounced positive affective impacts, which appear to be the main effect of the digital tools in this study. Overall, the students are very positive to digital tools in fieldwork, preferring they were introduced early during the bachelor program, but after traditional field methods are learnt. When given a choice, most students chose to combine traditional and digital tools for their fieldwork.