Using mobile devices to enhance undergraduate field research

Mobile devices can enhance undergraduate research projects and students’ research capabilities. The use of mobile devices such as tablet computers will not automatically make undergraduates better researchers, but their use should make investigations, writing, and publishing more effective and may even save students time. We have explored some of the possibilities of using “tablets” and “smartphones” to aid the research and inquiry process in geography and bioscience fieldwork. We provide two case studies as illustration of how students working in small research groups use mobile devices to gather and analyze primary data in field-based inquiry. Since April 2010, Apple’s iPad has changed the way people behave in the digital world and how they access their music, watch videos, or read their email much as the entrepreneurs Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive intended. Now with “apps” and “the cloud” and the ubiquitous references to them appearing in the press and on TV, academics’ use of tablets is also having an impact on education and research. In our discussion we will refer to use of smartphones such as the iPhone, iPod, and Android devices under the term “tablet”. Android and Microsoft devices may not offer the same facilities as the iPad/iphone, but many app producers now provide versions for several operating systems. Smartphones are becoming more affordable and ubiquitous (Melhuish and Falloon 2010), but a recent study of undergraduate students (Woodcock et al. 2012, 1) found that many students who own smartphones are “largely unaware of their potential to support learning”. Importantly, however, students were found to be “interested in and open to the potential as they become familiar with the possibilities” (Woodcock et al. 2012). Smartphones and iPads could be better utilized than laptops when conducting research in the field because of their portability (Welsh and France 2012). It is imperative for faculty to provide their students with opportunities to discover and employ the potential uses of mobile devices in their learning. However, it is not only the convenience of the iPad or tablet devices or smartphones we wish to promote, but also a way of thinking and behaving digitally. We essentially suggest that making a tablet the center of research increases the connections between related research activities.

Security, trust and privacy supported by context-aware middleware

Driven by new network and middleware technologies such as mobile broadband, near-field communication, and context awareness the so-called ambient lifestyle will foster innovative use cases in building automation, healthcare and agriculture. In the EU project Hydra1 highlevel security, trust and privacy concerns such as loss of control, profiling and surveillance are considered at the outset. At the end of this project the Hydra middleware development platform will have been designed so as to enable developers to realise secure ambient scenarios especially in the user domains of building automation, healthcare, and agriculture. This paper gives a short introduction to the Hydra project, its user domains and its approach to ensure security by design. Based on the results of a focus group analysis of the building automation domain typical threats are evaluated and their risks are assessed. Then, specific security requirements with respect to security, privacy, and trust are derived in order to incorporate them into the Hydra Security Meta Model. How concepts such as context security, semantic security, and virtualisation support the overall Hydra approach will be introduced and illustrated on the basis of a technical building automation scenario.

Towards semantic resolution of security in ambient environments

Driven by new network and middleware technologies such as mobile broadband, near-field communication, and context awareness the so-called ambient lifestyle will foster innovative use cases in different domains. In the EU project Hydra high-level security, trust and privacy concerns such as loss of control, profiling and surveillance are considered at the outset. At the end of this project the. Hydra middleware development platform will have been designed so as to enable developers to realise secure ambient scenarios. This paper gives a short introduction to the Hydra project and its approach to ensure security by design. Based on the results of a focus group analysis of the user domain "building automation" typical threats are evaluated and their risks are assessed. Then, specific security requirements with respect to security, privacy, and trust are derived in order to incorporate them into the Hydra Security Meta-Model. How concepts such as context, semantic resolution of security, and virtualisation support the overall Hydra approach will be introduced and illustrated on the basis of it technical building automation scenario.

Next generation mobile marketing: how young consumers react to Bluetooth-enabled advertising

Mobile devices are attractive media for directly communicating with consumers who have become busier and more difficult to reach. While SMS (short message service) advertising has received some attention in the literature, Bluetooth-enabled advertising is still unexplored. This research aims to investigate younger consumers’ acceptance of Bluetooth-delivered advertising. Although the majority of the respondents were willing to accept this form of advertising, they needed both to be in control of the frequency with which they receive messages and also to be reassured that the medium could ensure privacy and security. The research further indicated that peers influence the acceptance of Bluetooth-driven advertising.

Obstacle avoidance routing scheme through optimal sink movement for home monitoring and mobile robotic consumer devices

In recent years, ZigBee has been proven to be an excellent solution to create scalable and flexible home automation networks. In a home automation network, consumer devices typically collect data from a home monitoring environment and then transmit the data to an end user through multi-hop communication without the need for any human intervention. However, due to the presence of typical obstacles in a home environment, error-free reception may not be possible, particularly for power constrained devices. A mobile sink based data transmission scheme can be one solution but obstacles create significant complexities for the sink movement path determination process. Therefore, an obstacle avoidance data routing scheme is of vital importance to the design of an efficient home automation system. This paper presents a mobile sink based obstacle avoidance routing scheme for a home monitoring system. The mobile sink collects data by traversing through the obstacle avoidance path. Through ZigBee based hardware implementation and verification, the proposed scheme successfully transmits data through the obstacle avoidance path to improve network performance in terms of life span, energy consumption and reliability. The application of this work can be applied to a wide range of intelligent pervasive consumer products and services including robotic vacuum cleaners and personal security robots1.

Creating and implementing a biodiversity recording app for teaching and research in environmental studies

This case study reports on the development of a bespoke mobile recording app for collating records of biodiversity sightings on a University campus. This innovative project was achieved through a multi-disciplinary partnership of staff and students. It is hoped that the app itself will benefit lecturers by streamlining data collection during teaching and learning activities, whilst engaging students and highlighting the wealth of diversity available on campus

Ability of students to recognize the relationship between using mobile apps for learning during fieldwork and the development of graduate attributes

The increasing importance of employability in Higher Education curricula and the prevalence of using mobile devices for fieldbased learning prompted an investigation into student awareness of the relationship between the use of mobile apps for learning and the development of graduate attributes (GAs) (and the link to employability). The results from post-fieldwork focus groups from four field courses indicated that students could make clear links between the use of a variety of mobile apps and graduate attribute development. The study suggests a number of mobile apps can align simultaneously with more than one graduate attribute. Furthermore, prior experience and the context of use can influence students’ perceptions of an app and its link with different GAs.

Effectiveness of mobile apps in teaching field-based identification skills

It has been suggested that few students graduate with the skills required for many ecological careers, as field-based learning is said to be in decline in academic institutions. Here, we asked if mobile technology could improve field-based learning, using ability to identify birds as the study metric. We divided a class of ninety-one undergraduate students into two groups for field-based sessions where they were taught bird identification skills. The first group has access to a traditional identification book and the second group were provided with an identification app. We found no difference between the groups in the ability of students to identify birds after three field sessions. Furthermore, we found that students using the traditional book were significantly more likely to identify novel species. Therefore, we find no evidence that mobile technology improved students’ ability to retain what they experienced in the field; indeed, there is evidence that traditional field guides were more useful to students as they attempted to identify new species. Nevertheless, students felt positively about using their own smartphone devices for learning, highlighting that while apps did not lead to an improvement in bird identification ability, they gave greater accessibility to relevant information outside allocated teaching times.