Note - a shorter flyer is also available for this project:
Mudlarking in Deptford flyer (66kb pdf)

Overview

There's the standard school trip - and then there's Mudlarking...

The school tour has been a part of the education process for decades, but the full potential of this activity is not realised since it is often a static, one-way experience.

The Mudlarking in Deptford project was designed to enable young people aged 11-14 to actively engage with an area of historic and educational interest, Deptford Creek, by using state-of-the-art mobile technology to design and produce their own guided tour.

Students helped to create multimedia 'enhanced landscapes' which were combined to create a wider historical tour that combines text, drawings, images (still and video) and audio - and which future visitors to the Creek can access and perhaps add their own reflections. The outcome is a rich and fluid journey companion for all visitors to the Creek.

The results illustrate that it is possible to extend the experience of education outside the conventional classroom environment, using affordable and accessible mobile technologies.

Context

Since at least the 19th century, scavengers, sightseers and the curious have been drawn to exposed areas of busy rivers such as the Thames at low tide. Why? All sorts of weird and wonderful 'treasures' can be found there - flotsam and jetsam, rubbish - but also discarded valuables, antiques and relics. All of this adds to a multi layered 'history' of the area and the people who live around it.

In dense urban areas such as Deptford, in south-east London, local history can be explored through a tapestry of architecture, engineering, natural habitats and the River Thames itself.

One of the conventional ways to teach local history is through the guided tour, where a single tour leader guides a large group of students around an area, perhaps with the aid of worksheets and other printed materials. However, whilst this kind of teaching does encourage students to make connections between the various elements of the environment, it could go further in enabling students to make these connections for themselves.

The Mudlarking in Deptford project encourages students to actively discover their environment by travelling through the area, noting the Creek's various smells, sights, sounds, objects and buildings. Students are then encouraged to make wider associations with issues such as regeneration, industrial heritage and natural habitats.

Modern communication technologies allow educators to add another dimension to the experience: mobile and satellite networks allow students to record their observations in real-time, and to see immediately the connections between the layers of history before them. They can then add their own texture to the layers of history and experience around the site.

Thus the concept was born of using technology to aid the modern mudlarker to not just access the past but extend it - enabling today's students to leave 'virtual notes' for other visitors about their environment - as well as access possible future scenarios (artist's impressions of future ideas such as floating allotments etc).

The ingredients: How we got there

The idea for Mudlarking in Deptford was brought to Futurelab by Juliet Sprake of Goldsmiths College, University of London, who then worked with us to develop it into an effective learning resource.

To build on this vision, we drew on the knowledge of the local community and other experts in environmental studies, local history and Deptford redevelopment, and offered them the means to both design and experience such an 'enriched tour'. We invited them to help to re-imagine what, to some, would be a very familiar environment and, to others, one rich in mystery.

The project was supported through Futurelab's 'Call for Ideas' process, which encourages educators, researchers and those from the technology and creative industries to work collaboratively to develop new ways of using technology to help learning.

Initial steps

At the outset of the project, the team worked with a local student group to create a paperbased map of their local environment, beginning with their school. This was then developed into a paper-based tour of the mudlarking location (Creekside Education Centre in Deptford) providing vital data for the design of the electronic tour, in which the students took the lead with support from designers.

Meanwhile, the designers created a prototype application that would be used for the nine-month pilot project that included wireframing, user experience testing, iterative user-based workshops and technical trials.

The original application was based on a series of workshops involving designers working alongside students, which determined essential features of the PDA, both as a data collection and communication tool. These workshops also produced ideas for the user interface and specified what tools the user should have available in order to be able to input their own stories into the tour.

The experts then collaborated with the student design group to develop an interactive landscape, centred around four major destination points (or nodes) on the journey: Halfpenny Hatch; the Laban dance centre; Creek Road and Greenwich Reach. Each of these nodes has specific attributes that demonstrate Deptford's changing history. On their PDAs users could navigate their present position using GPS, which was one of the features of the trial that most excited the students, against a suggested map.

User data in the form of recorded audio, MP3 files, photography, drawings and text could then be added into the landscape. This was key to enabling tour visitors to participate in building an ever-evolving tour, by leaving their thoughts and memories for future tour users.

Dynamic activities were suggested around each of the nodes. One of the most popular was the 'wobbleometer', which takes place on a bridge that vibrates in response to local traffic in a spectacular way. Another was the 'tarantella' - named after the famous Spanish dance - that referred to the mesh structure of the man-made hills near the Laban dance centre which students thought looked like webs made by a giant spider.

Aims

The overall purpose of the project was to rethink the traditional guided tour and to develop a modern alternative that would be more involving and which would evolve over time ie a rich, interactive tour for both students and adults. The key questions Futurelab sought to answer through the project were:

• how does the fact that users can change the tour and the tour is not a one-way flow of information help to develop creative responses to the built environment?
• how can mobile technologies enable young learners to interact with an everyday urban site differently?
• how can sharing experiences through location-sensitive technologies create a common understanding between users?

A second core aim of the project was to develop a toolkit that enables students to investigate and creatively respond to the built environment. When developing and testing the Mudlarking in Deptford application, it was assessed against the following success criteria:

• how well Mudlarking in Deptford enhanced the young people's engagement with semi-formal educational activities
• how far the application enabled users to represent their knowledge in an innovative way
• how much users were encouraged to participate in a guided tour, rather than passively receiving information.

Additional aims of the project include:

• encouraging local people to re-imagine an otherwise familiar environment
• working with local students at the design stage.

Initial trial

The trial was split into three parts. 23 students from the local area were involved, around half of which were from the co-design team who had originally designed the tour. A second group was selected from a different school, Deptford Green School, which had not been involved in the project prior to the trial. Also involved were adults who had asked to participate in the scheme as an optional part of the London Open House event.

Students completing the trial tour were split into four groups, each starting the tour at a different destination node on the route. The groups were then split into pairs and each pair of students was given a PDA, a GPS transmitter and a pair of headphones to listen to audio content on the handheld computer.

Before embarking on the tour, students were given a briefing including instruction on how to use the devices, how to manually reboot the GPS in the event of a failure, and how to restart the PDA if it crashed. Students also filled in a questionnaire about their expectations of the tour. Students then set off on a suggested route for the tour. During the tour, all students were accompanied by a teacher and an observer, who ensured the students' safety and watched their behaviour during the tour.

Finally the whole group met back at the Creekside Centre for a post-tour debriefing with interviews and questionnaires.

Findings

Overall, responses to the Mudlarking in Deptford project were extremely positive. Using four nodes to structure the tour allowed students to take a break from the technology to converse with fellow students, and to complete other activities while travelling between nodes. The students were interested in the technology and being able to identify their position on a map gave them a sense of being truly involved in the tour. It also acted as a 'safety net' to reaffirm that the tour was working even when no particular content was being delivered to the handsets.

The students enjoyed taking part not only in activities they had worked on themselves, but also those designed by other students. In addition, because the tasks are interactive and fun, they are likely to serve as more effective memory prompts in the classroom. Activities such as the 'wobbleometer' and 'mushrooming' are more memorable than dry fact sheets often produced during guided tours.

Although the students were divided into groups and pairs, there was a lot of interaction and collaboration at the nodes along the route. Students shared 'hidden stories' from the environment, both during and after the tour. In this way the flexibility of the experience is demonstrated.

The ability to record their own experiences for a 'real' audience was an attractive feature for the students, and the variety of methods available to record stories meant that all students were able to capture at least some experiences to share with others.

Teething problems largely centred on the technology, and included:

• some students were not able to use the record facility on their PDA
• some GPS transmitters experienced problems because of cloudy conditions
• some PDA screens were obscured by rainwater or bright sunlight.

However, students were not deterred by these problems, and all were still keen to complete as much of the tour as possible.

Technology

The underlying technology was the Mobile Bristol toolset (www.mobilebristol.com), an emerging tool for manipulating a 'digital' version of urban landscapes through application of mobile and pervasive information technology.

The devices given to users were multimedia personal digital assistants (PDAs). The PDA used was a Hewlett-Packard iPaq with 256Mb memory card to help support the range of media used.

Crucial to the overall experience was the use of standard Bluetooth GPS (provided by portable transmitter) as well as a Flash user interface. User could share the audio elements of the tour through two sets of headphones attached to the PDA.

The future

The project had a number of aims in seeing how technology could be used to help students more actively 'discover' the built environment using a variety of senses, instead of simply viewing and then interpreting it.

Although the initial trial was limited, it is felt that there are many early findings to suggest that participatory tours could be developed for a wider use.

Future exploration of the issues that have been identified could include more work on the role/contribution of the teacher and other adults, looking at how much more pre- and post-tour activities could be linked within the classroom context, and a look at the pay-off between the benefits of authoring a tour for other people to enjoy and participating in one yourself.

Beyond that, further investigation is needed into how best to support mobile learners.

Resources

Juliet Sprake and Peter Rogers have developed a website that shows elements of the prototype tour in action: www.cracksinconcrete.co.uk

A number of other resources may also be usefully consulted if you are interested in this project:

Literature review in Mobile Technologies and Learning

Futurelab Innovations Workshops on Future (3G) phones and Investigating the Educational Toolset for the PDA - www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/innovations_workshops

Mobile Bristol is a programme investigating how mobile devices and pervasive information technology can be used to enhance the ways in which people experience and interact with their physical environment and with each other in urban and public spaces - www.mobilebristol.com

The team and our partners

Futurelab would like to thank the project originator Juliet Sprake, lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and digital artist and lecturer Peter Rogers, also from Goldsmiths College. We are also indebted to the team at Mobile Bristol, without whom the project would not have been possible.

Our thanks also go to:

• the staff, partners and students, some of whom were members of the project design group, as well as students who took part in the tour
• Lee Carrotte, interface designer
• Ella Tallyn, user experience consultant
• the Department of Trade and Industry.

Supported by:

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