A CASE STUDY OF USING IPHONE TO DIGITALLY RECORD GEOLOGIC FIELD DATA AT BSU SUMMER FIELD CAMP
An iPhone was given to each graduate student attending the Ball State Summer Field Camp in 2012. These students previously used the more traditional mapping tools such as Brunton compasses, field notebooks, and GPS units for their field work. The iPhone was provisioned with software that allows students to collect seven types of field information including photo, note, video, audio, GPS coordinates, strike and dip, and orientation. Each deployment of these functions was time stamped to help students correlate various types of information related to the same outcrop. Upon returning from the field, collected information were uploaded to an in-house developed web information system that can output a trip packet with the related photos, notes and/or video/audio embedded in each stop in the KML format, which is then ready for a visual presentation on the Google Earth.
Conclusions were made according to the results of the post-trip survey and the instructor’s field observations: 1) all students own less than three geology-related apps, 2) students adapt to the use of iPhone for their field tasks almost effortlessly especially for those who are already smartphone owners, 3) Photo, Note, and Strike-and-Dip were the most-used functions, 4) students used iPhone for shorter notes and switched to the field note book for longer field descriptions, 5) students did not adapt to Audio recordings for longer field descriptions at all. We also identified that the issue of data organization needs to be addressed so that students can retrieve data of interest easily for further data manipulation. We will continue to work on the development of a better data organization scheme that will allow users to retrieve and correlate records more intuitively to make the iPhone a more viable tool of choice for digital field data collecting.