Hi All,

Please consider submitting an abstract to our session on Virtual Fieldwork. Details are below and in the attached flyer (with pretty pictures!)

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Cheers,

Don

T187. The Evolution and Diversity of Virtual Fieldwork Experiences
Don Haas, Wendy L. Taylor, Frank Granshaw

Sponsors: National Association of Geoscience Teachers; GSA Geoscience Education Division

Brief description: Changing technologies are making capturing and sharing aspects of field experiences easier and richer. How has virtual fieldwork changed and diversified over time? Do we know what students are learning from using and making Virtual Fieldwork Experiences?
Geoscience Education | Geoscience Information/Communication
Submit Abstract to this Session: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2019AM/top/papers/index.cgi…

Rationale:

Rapidly changing technological and pedagogical approaches allow us to explore places we cannot physically go, and to virtually bring along our students as virtual co-investigators into the field when it is not practical to bring them along physically.

Multimedia makes it possible for users to visit and explore places they cannot visit and explore. The concept is not new - as long as we have been telling stories, we have used words and pictures to take people to distant places in their minds.

VR helps us to do this in a new way that is compelling for the following reasons:

• Virtual reality is becoming an increasingly popular media amongst many of our students - This presents a number of opportunities for how we present our science to our students.

• There has been a rapid expansion in the past decade in the number of virtual reality tools for geoscience education.

• The technology for producing virtual reality environments is now widely available, inexpensive, accessible, and “user-friendly” - This makes it possible for students to add VFE creation to their fieldwork toolkit.

• Increasingly virtual reality is being used in industry and research to document environmental restoration, construction, and field work - As a community of geoscience educators we need to be familiarizing our students with tools and practices that they might be using in future professions.

The scope and differing natures of VFEs is broad as are the ways in which they can be used in learning about different environments. The session organizers will strive to include a range of technological and pedagogical approaches to virtual fieldwork, how they have changed over time, and  the development of a taxonomy for VFE classification.

The session convenors have all been working with Virtual Fieldwork for over a decade.