THE DIGITAL CLASSROOM OF TOMORROW: INCORPORATING DIGITAL GEOLOGY AND CYBERMAPPING INTO THE UNDERGRADUATE GEOSCIENCES CURRICULUM

Imagine that you are walking into your geology classroom. You walk through the doors and pick up some polarized lenses. You sit down in the dark cubical of a classroom with electronic devices hanging all around you blinking to their own rhythm. As the professor walks in the projectors fire up, soon you find yourself standing in front of an outcrop located along a shore half way around the world. The three dimensional image in front of you is so real you are waiting for the breeze and sounds of water to pick up. Your professor zooms into a section of outcrop that exposes a perfect example of a fault line in the cliff face then continues across the exposed foreshore. Today's topic, faulting – let the lectures and digital field trips begin.

This is not science fiction, it is science reality, and should be the classroom and teaching style for the next generation of geologists. This is reality at several universities and companies around the world. The best outcrops in the world can be downloaded from cyberspace. Teaching students structure, sedimentology, sequence stratigraphy – any geology class – not with two dimensional drawings on a chalk board, but with three dimensional digital models that not only have centimeter-scale resolution and globally referenced, but can also be measured and digitized in the classroom. These models effectively improve the learning environment for future geologists. Every geologist knows the best way to learn is in the field, so why not bring the field into the classroom?