Using C & IT to Support Fieldwork on Tenerife

Abstract

There has been a great deal of interest over recent years in the use of communications and information technology (C&IT) applications for fieldwork support, with the idea of virtual fieldtrips much discussed within the context of e-learning initiatives in geography (Lemke and Ritter, 2000; Stainfield et al., 2000). The concept of virtual fieldwork, however, is problematic to many geography, earth and environmental scientists in universities, who fear that managers may see this as a replacement for costly and risky fieldwork (Burnett et al., 1998). The increasing consensus seems to be that nothing can replace the field experience, but C&IT can provide an excellent support or supplement to fieldwork. This paper reports on world wide web (WWW) and information technology (IT) support materials developed for Stage 2 fieldwork on the island of Tenerife. Development of this material took place over a number of years, with support from the Geography Department and the University of Hull Staff Development fund. The fieldtrip has been run annually since 1996, with between 26 and 46 students and 3–4 staff on each trip.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.