Tag Archives: rapidInnovation

ERA field trip at Plymouth ‘GEES Learning and Teaching’ conference

On-site video feed at Devon Great Consols.

On July 7th, the ERA team and our Plymouth University GEES collaborators John Maskell, Paul Lunt, Jason Truscott, Matt Sharples and Alison Stokes demonstrated the use of remote learning with ERA technology at the Devon Great Consols site. A minibus load of delegates from both the GEES Subject Centre 10th Anniversary Conference and the GEES Early Career Lecturers Workshop were shown a remote investigation of the site, delivered by John Maskall and Paul Lunt, with Matt Sharples as camera operator.

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Plymouth University trials ERA

Remote students at Devon Great Consols

At the end of June, we conducted some experiments to evaluate the performance of ERA-assisted fieldwork compared to the same fieldwork task being performed by students visiting the site directly. Four groups of students volunteers visited Devon Great Consols to perform an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) task related to a fictional plan to exploit metals available in the waste heaps on the site, left over from its time as an arsenic extraction plant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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ERA introduction video

Here’s a 2 minute video we produced for our field trials in Plymouth as an introduction to the ERA project.

ERA Introduction Video, 14MB download, x264. Will play with VLC or Quicktime.

ERA visits Plymouth to demonstrate at GEES

ERA 'Student' set-up at Devon Great Consols mine

On Monday 29th March (2010) we (John and Trevor) visited the Higher Education Academy’s Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences Subject Centre based at the University of Plymouth. We met with John Maskall and Jason Truscott, and showed them the portable wireless network toolkit we’ve been developing in ERA.

Here is a video clip and some photos from the demo we did at the Devon Great Consols Mine.

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Portable VoWLAN: A portable voice over wireless local area network for mobile learning

Screen shots

Chris on Whitby foreshore testing voice and video; note headset and external camera, with field antennae in the background

Trevor testing a pair of Asterisk servers

Tutor and students at the ERA base location viewing the video feed and communicating via VoIP with the field geologist. Howick, Friday 07 August 2009

A portable wireless network used to improve access to geology field work locations

Description

The Portable VoWLAN Toolkit is a battery-powered wireless local area network, optimised for voice and video data. Developed for use in university geology field courses, the toolkit provides a 802.11g WiFi network, a VoIP telephony server, and streaming video. During a field trip students and lecturers can use VoIP softphones to talk to one another, and any web standards compliant browser to view streaming video and collected photos. Although developed to improve student access to geology fieldwork, the resulting generic toolkit can be applied to support any mobile learning context where live communication is required.

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