9UNP1297SD_Justin_Hougham_WordPress 
- Thank you all for coming to Upham Woods' Outdoor Learning Center. It is my pleasure to introduce the director of Upham Woods, Dr. Justin Hougham, as part of the Digital Observation Technology Skills training we have taking place here today.
Dr. Hougham received his Bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science from Indiana University. Then he went onto pursue a Master's in Education and a Ph.D. in Education from Washington State University. He did his post-Doctoral research through a NASA Innovations and Climate Education fellowship, focusing on Education at the Speed of Research.
Dr. Hougham is also a State Specialist for Environmental Education in the Department of Youth Development. He has conducted extensive research with these D.O.T.S. kits which we are going to be using throughout this training. Through over four years of field testing and experience all over the globe, including places like Greenland, Costa Rica and the South Pacific Ocean, Dr. Hougham has carefully selected mobile technologies which can be used indoors and outdoors to enhance STEM education in learners of all ages.
These kits and this training are currently available to educators and schools all throughout the state. And now, Dr. Justin Hougham.
- Thank you, Alex.
Great, alright. Well good morning. We're going to run through some slides here today that'll go over the intention behind using technology outdoors, as well as the direct application of those tools in the context that, that we've, we've learned they work in, and maybe that show where potential lies for, for future work. So, we'll be paddling later today across that stretch there, in canoes and probably a little bit more organized fashion than you see in this picture. 
They are following the universal law of canoeing, which is no two canoes can be pointed in the same direction at the same time on the Wisconsin River which-- state law, fun fact. 
(laughing)
So this front part is called 'Technology and Education.' You see another line here, 'Education at the Speed of Research' which is the bigger umbrella that this work is inspired by and we research under. So fundamentally asking: what does it mean to include students as participants in research; what does it mean to connect them to the research that's happening in their communities; and, maybe inspire them to ask questions about their own environment later on down the line.
So the slides that we'll see here, we'll go over an over-view of Upham Woods. We'll go over some of the theoretical foundations of technology and outdoor settings. Get a little bit into digital design, and then, and then into the topic of the day which is our D.O.T.S. kits. 
So a little bit about Upham Woods. We're getting ready to celebrate our 75th anniversary. We're in year, year 74. I think we'll make it to 75. And that's a pretty long tenure for a center like this, and I'm really excited and proud to be a part of that tradition.
And as you can see here, it's been donated to the University of Wisconsin for youth development, and specifically that's 4-H and Extension. And we work with a lot of people across the state. We, 4-H being the, the, I guess the brand on what we do. But we have a lot of other people we reach.
Moving on down the line, we have 2/3 of the youth we serve are coming from schools, directly from schools like the students that are here on site today from the Madison area. They come from Milwaukee. They come from Illinois. And as you'll see later today when we're out afield, this is a great venue for education.
We reach about nine to ten thousand youth a year here on site and another thousand to two thousand in outreach programming. And that represents folks, depending upon the year, from up to 40 different counties in the state. So we're pretty proud of that and proud of the work we're doing here. We're a 310 acre campus for environmental learning and a laboratory for extending science education to these youth.
So in addition to the schools and 4-H groups that are here, we're open on the weekends for trainings like the one we're doing today. We're open for Scout groups or other youth-oriented groups that are looking to do something like this. So we really do reach a lot of different folks.
And here's some, some photos. You can see that all these slides are up on the website as well. So be sure to check that out. We have a great classroom here.
So getting to that classroom, I'm going to go back to this slide which you saw on the title slide. And this is the Wisconsin River. And on the left, your left, you can see the island, Blackhawk Island, which is a 200 acre State Natural Area. And on the right you see the mainland which is actually just within sight of where we're standing right now.
So what, what strikes me about this photo, of course, is perspective, in addition to what I mentioned about the canoes not pointing in the same direction. The perspective of this photo-- it's not taken from a dock. It's not taken from another boat. As you can see, it's taken from an elevated space, and that's from a drone. And we had a-- some activities here last summer using this equipment. We have one of these pieces of equipment on site right now. And it, you know, that's an issue that's evolving in our society. It's evolving in education. It's evolving in industry and in policy and regulations. It's, it's one of the edges of where technology is pushing what we know about and what we might want to do with things later.
And for us, connecting to that is important. So we can understand our world, but also prepare our students for the world they're going to live and work in-- not just the world that we came from-- but the world that doesn't yet exist, that they're going to shape.
So you see here the drone operator, Tony Roman. You see some students here taking a look at that. And I don't know what you think those students look like, but I, I-- that looks like they're pretty interested in what's going on there. That's-- I don't think that's a hard story to tell. They want to know about this technology. And I really assert that nature centers like this, environmental education centers, can be not just places to engage youth about their passion for nature, but also their passion for the world around them and passion for technology that makes those two things possible. So this is a great example of that.
And it's also a great example of a concept called a shifting baseline. So, the idea of a shifting baseline-- this was recently in a, in a lecture from a colleague of mine at Lakehead University, David Greenwood. And I really liked this idea, because it talked-- it mentions or addresses a lot of things in our world. And I'll read a passage from this writing. But it says here, "When it comes to nature, normal is in the eye of the beholder." And I think that has ecological implications, but also pedagogical implications in how we teach and what we learn.
So I'll read a little bit further from this-- from J. B. MacKinnon's work here. "Researchers have since found evidence of shifting baseline syndrome among people and in places as wide-ranging as bush meat hunters in Equatorial Guinea, birdwatchers in Yorkshire, England, and villagers along the Yangtze River in China.
"As chance would have it, one of the most startling studies was carried out in the Gulf of Mexico in the adjoining Caribbean Sea. Marine biologist Loren McClenachan, currently an Associate Professor at Colby College, compared big game fishermen's photos from the Florida Keys from the 1950s to the modern day. In the old black and white photos, the biggest fish, strung up on the dock, were as tall and as wide as the fishermen themselves. While the rest of the day's catch was piled up in heaps on the side. By 2007, over fifty years later, the catch is dominated by snappers that measure just a little bit longer than a grade school ruler in the same places. The small fish of past years were often larger than the 'trophy' fish of recent times. Most striking of all is that fishermen look equally pleased with themselves through the generations: the same wide smiles, the same back-slapping with Hemingway pride."
Gosh, this points out a couple ideas I think are really important here. One, obviously, in the intention of the writing is around the ecological baseline that's shifting. The size of fish, the number of fish, the species of fish. And so that's certainly true. 
The second piece, though, I think as well, is technology. And technology is a shifting baseline. A conversation about drones today is going to be different than it was two years ago. And it will be really different in five years. And where those two ideas converge, just as an example, is technology moves a baseline up and provides digital artifacts that overlap and begin to expand what we can remember. It can begin to expand what we know about the past and about the future by increasing the bandwidth and the resolution of the data we collect.
So we'll get into that a little bit more deeply today. And an example as well you can see here, this is the Arctic Sea ice observation comparison from 1979 to 2012. And this image--this is NASA imagery. And you can see this is Greenland here in white and its land ice. And these, this other Technicolor here is, is sea ice and also evidence density or thickness of sea ice by the intensity of that color-- or saturation.
So you see, you know, really easily you can do analysis here and see a much smaller footprint of ice on top of, on top of the earth. So you know, what does that mean in terms of normal or eye of the beholder? What does that means in terms of technology? And as we press it, what does it mean when students are the people possessing that technology, and it's in their eyes that they're looking for what is normal and what their role will be in understanding that world as it evolves? So that's a little bit of an introduction to the theories in foundations that I'll talk about next. 
This photo here, this backdrop is the main Salmon River in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho. And I'll talk about why that photo's there shortly. So in my earlier work, I was working in this idea, with this theory of adventure learning. As you can see this is a conceptual framework that focuses on an Issue & Place. And it uses that methodology and wraps it with an Internet-Driven approach, Adventure as a component to explore an idea; Media Artifacts that are Synced as Learning Opportunities across classrooms. 
I thought that was pretty interesting, and I really, you know, got a lot of inspiration from that. And you can see that this is published by Veletsianos and Doering out of the Twin Cities at the time. Extending that, colleagues of mine that I research with, Dr. Idol and Dr. Miller, we thought about, what does it look like to do this on a smaller scale?
This first slide was happening at a global scale, like a National Geographic scale. Up on the, you know, at a seven-continent level. And I thought that was inspiring, but we wondered together, what does it look like to inspire kids in their classroom, in their place, about the things that they're doing? It's probably not that practical to bring every student to Antarctica. But we thought that there still lies a passion to connect to outdoors in every classroom, outdoors in every home or playground or, in this case, at Upham Woods.
So we took some of the original adventure learning principals. We modified that, or adapted it for our work, that we branded 'Adventure Learning @'. So we focus on a smaller scale, expeditions or modules. We focus on student-generated knowledge, not just expert-generated knowledge, but what do students participate in?-- which is very similar to what citizen science does. We look at focused, local observations and connecting that to global stories. And lastly, that interconnected expedition-- that means connecting our data to other data. And that might be another school, and it might be in another place. And it gives us a greater context for what we see outside today.
And here's another representation of that same idea. So again, we focus on small-scale, student-generated observations that are connected across semesters or connected across geographies. And so our first rounds of experimenting with this were in these, you know, big landscapes, so as I mentioned, the River of No Return. When we worked with that we had an expedition scientist. We had a group of students from a school that directly went on the trip. And we collected base-line data about, about stream health. And that was something that guides fisheries management and also informs that shifting baseline as towards how much fish do we see in what streams? And what happens once there's a fire, and how long does it take for their population to rebound? 
So these measurements are really accessible, easy to take. They're just taken in really remote places. So their… their classmates would go and do the same set of measurements in the river outside of their own classroom. So every day we would post these, these measurements up on the web, via satellite. And the schools would follow along and execute their own measurements back on-site.
One of-- following that, I did a trans-Pacific sailing on this boat here. This is my left foot. You can see there, it's a little bit warmer day there than it was-- than it is here. And we took this ship. I was with two other folks here, Mark Reid and Joe Jones. And we did, we worked with a lot of these same tools to take ground truth information across the Pacific Ocean going from Mexico, across the Equator, down to the South Pacific and Tahiti. And those same tools-- you can see this is a Kestrel right here, and we have 'em in our kit today. And that, that's begun to inform what works in the field, what works in a classroom, what works in our urban environments. 
If it's survived in these really remote conditions from a factor of power or measurement or portability, I allege that it will work in pretty nearly any classroom it may find itself in. So that's part of what informs this kit.
And, you know, some changes along the way-- computers have gotten a little thinner. Our box got yellow instead of grey. But we've been working with this same idea for a long time. How do we take technology outside in a way that's productive, and in a way that doesn't distract from deep observation of a place, but enhances the conclusions we can draw?
And so the last in this series, was an expedition to Greenland. And we had 12 students with us on this site. And those students connected back to their classrooms, just like we did in the equator. We had live, live feeds back to classrooms that were taking the same measurements, or just like in Idaho when they were connecting back to their classrooms with the same measurements. Same thing in Greenland. Same tools that you see here on this table. They've been adjusted a little bit as technology evolves, but these exact same things were being used to look at climate science as it was emerging. 
And our students visited the Summit Station which is-- this is on, you know, well over or nearly two miles of ice in thickness on the ice sheet of Greenland. And you can see this building has, has jacks that allow it go up as the snow accumulates. So students went up there, directly made observations with tools that connected to research that was happening on the ground. But they connected that, importantly, connected that back home.
So again, yeah. This is pretty much the same tool-- different brand, but same idea.
And so this is a kind of a connection to the bigger picture and why I use the term 'education at the speed of research.' This photograph was taken by my research partner, Brant Miller, and it was featured on the cover of 'Nature' which is a journal about scientific research. And this came out almost a year and half after we were on-site with those kids. So these students were already aware of what happened long before this came out in the public. And this came out through peer review. Peer review is an important process for scientific knowledge. But at the same time, we thought that having students along the way creates a different type of energy and passion and connection about what they're learning. And it's real. And it's current. And it means something when they apply it. And this is just an example of that, that a year and a half later, you know, professionals and scientists can read about this in their, in their library. But a year and half before that, they could have tuned in to hear about these ideas from the students we had on-site. 
So that brings us to what's that look like on a local scale. So this quote here, maybe it's washed out from the light, but it says, "The exploration of nature should be a critical component of education." And these students are at the Mequon Nature Center. And they're-- let's see, this is Milwaukee First Nation Studies Program from Milwaukee Public Schools. And we're on-site with them working with these kids, going to the forest to figure out what we're interested in. What do we want to know more about? What are our tools to help us learn more about that?
In situating that further, this appeals to a part of an emerging discourse around what it means to be a digital native or a digital immigrant. As you can see in Prensky's 2006 nomenclature. There's a lot of different ways we can divide the world, of course: generations or geographies. But it's a really important difference between a lot of us in this room today and the students we teach-- they're just outside this room right now-- is that we grew up with a different set of tools. We grew up with pen and paper or typewriter or slide projector. Our students today-- and a lot of times this is framed as millennials-- but just in general, they're native to a digital world. They are not new to it. This is the only way-- the first way they came to see the world; the first way they came to see themselves; the first way they came to see each other was digitally. And that's, that's powerful. That's really powerful. How do we meet that need? How do we meet them where they are? How do we join them, learn from then? That's a really important thing facing not only environmental education, but, but classroom education, continuing ed, many, many, many other venues. 
So in general, the digital native idea is positioned kind of in contrast to a digital immigrant idea. And that many of us just looking around the room, I'm going to make some assumptions that you all are a little bit older than high school. So, or maybe a lot older in some cases. But we're immigrating to digital ways of knowing, because our job might come around to that, or... It isn't going to happen for all of us at the same time, but it is gonna happen.
So where does that tie into environmental education? I assert-- our team asserts that this informs outdoor inquiry. And centers that are very similar to this one grapple with that idea: how do we take kids outside? Do we come out to the environment just to unplug? Well, that's certainly valuable. Do we engage in a techno-fast, do we put our phones away? That's, that's great. And if that's the intention, that's a great intention.
But if our intention is to connect to science, I want to be intentional about what we put down and what we pick up. And in terms of technology, if we pick up an iPad, I want to make sure that it's increasing our connection outdoors and not isolating ourselves from what we can see, smell, touch and feel outside.
And this, not surprisingly, is informed by place-based education. How does our technology connect us more deeply to the places that we're learning? And here you see a further quotation from Sobel. And then Zimmerman also moves it a little bit further to connect our community. Our role as community members in science is a really important relationship. And it's emerging stronger than ever in this idea of citizen science.
Here's a couple examples out, you know, in the campus set-up with these tools, and then obviously in, this is in Upham Woods. But wherever that place is, if you're using that same tool, I think it makes a stronger connection between those ideas. And the questions you might ask are going to get a little bit deeper.
So going a little bit further, we'll take a look at a few quotations here. Many students feel that, that abstaining from the use of technology gets in the way of their familiar way of knowing and exploring the world. And that's what's kind of behind this statistic is in found in Liu's study. Forty-nine percent of students feel like that motivated them to be connected with this familiar tool out, outdoors. And more to the point, you can see in these other conclusions that this promoted a hands-on exploration. The "personal," "collaborative," and "interesting" interactive experience. And I'm not here to say that's right or wrong, but if it's what we observe in our students when they're outside, I think we have an obligation to meet them there where they're interested, where they're wanting to interact. And, and I think increasingly it's, it's a digital technology. 
So we-- adventure learning and adventure learning ed… These theories, they all mention this idea in a different way. But these digital artifacts allow for reflection after the fact. And that reflection can turn into sharing, like on social media. And it can turn into a lab report that instead of just being written, it can include these photos, these comparisons. These photos were taken at University of Wisconsin-Platteville with a summer camp we had at the research farm. And so it doesn't have just be about a place like Upham Woods, but it could be on a farm. And we could have questions using these tools that extend the senses. 
And so when we work here, we use these kits that you can see here, we'll be doing training on-- you can see that they, you know-- what's in these kits may change. It will change over the years. But the idea of its portability, the idea of it being contained as a learning laboratory will remain the same. 
As you know, technology gets smaller and cheaper and more portable over time, as a function of time. And these kits will change that way, too. But for right now, they extend the senses in a few important categories. And they make the invisible visible to us in a lot of different ways. Which leads to what drives a lot of my work, and that's a summary of this saying that 'it's common sense for us to adopt ways that use new devices to reach our students, to see the world that's emerging.'
So getting into the methodology of-- where does all this data go? Or, why are we headed there? This Venn diagram is one that I directly use with students when we teach. And you can see a few questions at the top here: "Why do we tell stories?"; "What makes a scientific study?"; and, "What does it take to tell a scientific story?" And for us, tools that move us in those directions are, are what we think are good tools-- tools that are productive for us. 
So why do we tell stories? When I asked this question in a class of third graders or adult education like we're doing today, same answers, why do we tell stories: to educate, to entertain, to remember, to share ideas. And similarly to what makes a scientific study, what are the key components of that-- or why do we do it: we do it to answer questions, we do it with a hypothesis, we do it by collecting some data and making observations with a methodology and taking measurements.
But where those two ideas overlap is really important. You know, if you have a hypothesis and data and observations, and it isn't connected to the idea of 'how do I educate with that?', or 'how do I entertain with that?', or 'how do I share it?', 'how do we remember it?' How do we shift that baseline? Then those worlds kind of live apart. And I think that's unnecessary. 
So moving towards the point: what does it take to tell a scientific story is the combination of good storytelling and good science, and the tools that'll help us do that in the middle. We want to use data in observations we collect to answer a question, and we want to teach others about our discovery by sharing the story of our study, our results, and the photos and videos of the process-- or digital artifacts.
Digging a little deeper into pedagogy, and then we'll move into some of the direct application. You can see these ideas still underpin what we do. These are very similar adaptations to what you saw in the previous slides about adventure learning that the hypothesis drives the inquiry. And the inquiry can be scaled from my specific place to another place. Students generate the knowledge. It isn't just an expert based module; it's a participatory science. And that participation shows up in an authentic narrative. And that's in the students' own voice, with the student's own data, with the questions she or he thinks are important, with the images she or he thinks tell that story well. In, as I just went into, the digital media artifact really is the tool of the day. That's how we're sharing information, whether it be through social media or on web presence or in video. 
And lastly, working as a group, working as a team. Any of the big discoveries of the past and any of the things that face us in the future are not likely to be solved by a single brilliant person, but by people that are working together and working towards something with one another. And I think that's really important unpacking what science is and science identity is.
So the kit-- shifting into the kit now. The kit has been designed to withstand international travel or harsh Arctic conditions or the ocean or wherever. And I think it'll survive in a classroom, based on that. 
(laughing)
 Maybe not, I don't know. I've-- I could be wrong. But I haven't lost a piece of equipment yet. And, you know, I think a common question is 'how much does this cost?' and 'aren't you scared of giving this expensive equipment to students?' And I'm not-- at all. It's, it's something I've been really proud to see over the years is how well it's respected when it's set up with intention.
And the intention behind it working and not taking up a lot of time trouble-shooting-- which I think is a huge barrier for people that are adopting technologies, is how often you're fiddling around with cords, or looking for an adaptor, or this isn't charged, or I can't get a Wi-Fi signal, I can't get this off. I mean, I don't know who couldn't raise their hand and say they haven't said those things this week, probably. And in a classroom, that's a high-stakes environment. You know, you have 30 people that are way better at this than you, and judging you, watching you kind of fumble around. So you're like, 'oh man, credibility is going down!'
So how does credibility go up? How does ease of our work go up? And it goes up in these categories, for me. Aside from just being prepared and rehearsed and knowing what you're doing, these ideas are functions of what helps that move smoothly in a classroom that's ready to do that on the island or ready to do third period and then fourth period and then fifth period. Or ready to move out, out onto the football field to do an activity with the atmosphere. 
So I look at these ideas: memory and power. I, right now, prefer that these are removable in any tool I adopt. And they're removable so that I can easily get 'em. And sometimes I end up with a tool that's less precise, but does still meet these qualities. I choose that, that tool. Maybe I pay a little bit more for it because I can easily, at a gas station wherever I am, get these pieces of power. And I don't have to plug-in 10 items into the wall and keep track of all those wall chargers, and then-- I mean, you know that can be really variably, and it can really create some flaws in the system. So if I have a bag of batteries and a stack of memory cards, I can solve a lot of those problems really quickly. 
That's going to change. Technology is a shifting baseline; it'll change. I probably won't be able to buy stuff with these types of memory and power in five years. It'll be all on-board and wireless. But right now, that's what it is for us.
Portability and off-line considerations: As you can see these things all operate in a hand-held capacity. They don't have a cord. They don't have to be into the wall, and they operate off-line. And off-line's important whether you're on a glacier or on a sailboat or in a classroom because of the firewalls that are often in local school networks or the internet is down. Well if the internet's down, are you just not teaching that day? I mean, that can't be the answer. And these are all things I think we've made as our own personal discoveries. But the tools that we select are tools that'll work without a Wi-Fi signal and without a cell signal.
We use dedicated devices. And that's a pedagogical consideration. You know, your phone does a lot of stuff. But if you hand out a stack of phones or a stack of iPads that do a lot of stuff, the trouble-shooting gets exponentially deeper because of all the students that are-- could be in all these different places, on all these different screens and different apps. So just to limit the trouble-shooting and smoothness of that work, you know, a class period can be-- you could only end up with 40 minutes outside. And cycling through an updates or whatever, that can really bog you down. 
So none of these tools need to be updated. They came with their onboard software, if they had it. And they do just what-- just their couple things. You know, this takes thermal imagery. You can't update anything on social media with it. It won't take-- it won't tell you how many steps you walked today. It just does what it does. And while at a personal level you-- we often choose tools that do a lot of things, like a Swiss Army knife or a Smartphone. As a teacher, I want things that do one thing really well, really simply, every time, the same way. And if I take a glance out and I see people struggling, I can see what they're holding and I can trouble-shoot it in my head in the five steps it takes to walk over to them, I already have my answer. And I don't have to, like, look at-- okay what do we have here? It looks like a-- this or that-- You know, this just has a few buttons. So I think that simplicity really helps us be effective in the field.
Two other ideas here: platform neutrality and digital artifact. You've heard me talk a lot about a digital artifact, and I want, as much as possible, all these tools to capture something. Capture data in a file or an image or a video, and they all do. The platform neutrality comes in as a designer because schools have adopted all kinds of different technologies: Chromebooks, Nexus tablets, Apple products. Who knows what's next?
And for this to be effective, it has to work on all those platforms. So the tools I've chosen are neutral in terms of what'll work. I don't want to rule out a school because of the platform they've adopted. It also limits the technology I have to bring. If I'm neutral to begin with, I don't have to bring 20 Chromebooks to support it. I can just go with what they have, if that makes sense. And that's just less charging, and that's less updates, that's less things in the trunk of my car and less things I have to buy. Because they've already invested in that-- schools have already invested in that.
So here's some photos on the island. We'll be out on site, exploring the site that's just out the window there. And this is another training just like the one we did today you're seeing on this schedule. We'll be out here for lunch into this, this part of the island. And we'll be out looking for a few data points. We'll take data in different spots, and that'll be guided by the use of our GPS to pre-establish way points that'll take us to game cameras. And when you get to a game camera, we'll download images from the game camera which is-- has night vision and is motion activated. So it captures deer or turkeys or whatever's out there. And whatever other students have left us. 
And so this is a great example. This is an image directly from our game camera. You can see the temperature, the date and time. And this is what I think of when I prepare for a digital native conversation. This student is using a GPS to find this way point. She was supposed to download information, but she also left, I think, some sense of humor on this camera. And I don't know what you guys think when you see her, but I think about how do I meet her where she is. What is she ready for? Where is she going to go to school in five years or ten years? Where is she going to be working? What is the world she needs to understand? 
I don't think about the ten years, thirty years ago when I was learning, you know, about this environment and saying, 'Well they should learn to use a field guide, and they should learn to use a sling psychrometer and a hand lens, and?' You know wh-- I can't defend that to her right now. That's where she is. I see her as kind of teasing us and saying, 'Hey! I'm waiting for you. Come on out here!' I want to use technology to see this world, and that's-- that shows to me a high degree of comfort and need for us to adapt.
So getting into the kit again, more specifically. We call them D.O.T.S. kits-- Digital Observation Technology Skills kits. And the tools may change over the years, but I think they'll always be doing the same thing. How do we take observations? And how do we see things we couldn't see before?
A great example of that with the first tool that we use is GPS. GPS informs GIS, and GIS is a very complex and growing field that underpins, you know, how you get stuff in your mailbox to how 9-1-1 will arrive at your house if it's on fire or there's an emergency. GIS underlies, you know, all of our behavior in the items that are in our lives today, you know, resources being managed, wildlife being tracked. And it helps us see relationships between variables that we couldn't see before-- we couldn't see with our naked eye, so to speak.
So taking that idea little bit further, we have a certain boundary to what we can see and think and process. And in this diagram you can see how that idea expands. And it already has expanded to include technology as a partner in helping us see the world. And we can all accept that there are things that are outside of our ability to see: radio waves, infrared waves. They exist. We have tools that give us information about those things that help us understand our world and participate in our jobs or economies of today and tomorrow. We know about ultraviolet light and x-rays. We know those applications, I think, conversationally. So we can accept there are things we can't see that we interact with all the time, and we have tools that help us do that. 
On this different scale, we have-- so a bandwidth and resolution relationship. We have galactic information, interstellar information that we're able to see beyond the naked eye. And we have microscopic information we can see beyond the naked eye. So imagine what we can see, touch, hear, feel, taste is in kind of this box. And I want to invite students into a world where they're using technology to see outside of that box, interact with that. I would argue that's been happening for hundreds of years. People have been trying to get out of that box with telescopes or whatever. That same idea is there-- technology helping us see things we couldn't see before. And that sight leading us to make decisions or discoveries beyond what we already know. So again, maybe in a different representation we have bandwidth and resolution that can expand by virtue of extended senses. And actually you could argue in time, as well. We can see what happened on a game camera two weeks ago. We can look back into space and see what happened lightyears ago. 
And so, that, that isn't all going to happen today, but I think conceptually when I have to answer 'Why is technology at this environmental education center?' I argue that I think it's always been there. It's always been behind what we want to learn. And so when we work with students, we talk about the scientific method. And I'll skip that for now. I assume you all are probably familiar with that. But I include this in the slides because it's where we often start with our students. We start with an idea of what are scientists, and what do they do. And just you know a very common way to introduce science identify in middle school. You see the, you know, the students will give these answers. It's a-- 'Oh, it's a guy! It's a-- they have crazy hair, they have a lab coat, beaker!' Or in a lab. And we allege that science is happening here in our landscape in ways that look just like their mom or dad or just like the people that are in their community. You can see very few lab coats in this set of pictures. And you see entomology and wildlife biology and fisheries biologist and soil scientists. These folks are using technologies. They're using 'em today, and they're digital and they make observations and records. 
So if we're going to really prepare folks to work in the natural sciences or sciences in general, technology has an extremely important and critical role there. And why not-- why would this not be a great place to introduce that?
And not everybody is going to be a scientist, so to speak. But backing it out even further, I think that we can ask, 'How do we-- how can we all think scientifically about the things in front of us-- about the decisions we have to make?' You know, if your car is having a problem or you're trying to trouble-shoot your computer or make a better meal if you're cooking or baking, there's a scientific process that's behind that and why it works. And trouble-shooting it is a scientific knowledge. So I think that it underpins directly the column of people that're going to be scientists. But I think in general, you know, our society benefits from, from that type of thinking.
So moving on to the different roles: We've divided, as I mentioned, these kits into tools. And each tool has a specific role, and we've situated that role as it participates in an identity or a, or a task that someone's dedicated to. That if you have the GPS, you are a navigator. And if you have a camera, you're the media specialist. And if you have the weather station, you are a meteorologist. If you have the microscope, you're the microbiologist. And we want to connect that this isn't just tools and toys, but they're really connected to ideas and identities. And later on, maybe careers and disciplines of study.
So I had mentioned we work with GPS, and that's the Navigator. And our classroom looks like this today. And we're down here in the 'Main Camp', but we'll go out onto the islands and take a look at these data points, download data, and we'll find them with this. And we can pass on new things that we find with this, because it'll record that information. And that's exactly how this map was made, was by taking this and walking that path. And another person can walk that path and discover those same things. 
When you get to those data sights and we download the images, we'll hopefully see things like this on the game camera. And this is important from a conceptual level as well, because it isn't just a data card that's brought back to a computer somewhere else back home. They can observe it right there in the field. And if they observe it in the field like you will today, you can begin to ask questions immediately in front of these stumps about this deer. You could go look at where that deer's walking. If you saw the deer eating something, you could look at what it's eating, because you're right there in front of that same space. And you can dig deeper with your inquiry as an immediate experience instead of an artificial one.
And it can also extend to other things. You can see the raccoons here in the water. And it's really unlikely, as you imagine, that we'll be here at 3 in the morning to see that. But we can see it. We can travel in time a little bit here with our digital observation, but it can still inform questions. If I'm in front of this camera. We download it. We see this. Maybe the students would say, 'Let's go see if their prints in the sand.' Or, 'Let's follow those prints somewhere else.' So it invites a deeper inquiry and mystery. So here you see a fox on here, which we've had a lot of guesses as to what he's doing and what he looks like.
The media specialist? They capture that story, back to the Venn diagram I talked about early on in this session. What does it mean to tell a scientific story? It means capturing media with intention. They can help tell the story of how we got the data we got-- how we came to answer the question we asked. And these photos are all taken from that device by our participants here on site. And it helps tell the story. Where did they collect that information? Who was collecting it? What other questions could be asked here? That's all invited by sharing media, and we'll be in these sites later today.
The meteorologist uses a Kestrel, that's what I-- that's a name brand of what this is. It takes wind speed and barometric pressure and temperature. And it gives us a baseline for understanding other temperature readings around the area and humidity readings. Why is that important? Well that underpins a lot of the ecology. It underpins a lot of habitat consideration. It underpins a lot of adaptation that happens between moss and lichen, trees and mammals and birds. Temperature is a huge driver of why things look the way they do and live where they do and interact with other organisms the way they do and when they do that. So temperature's a really important entry point for us. And we begin by splitting that world in living and non-living and making observations about those things as a basic binary.
The microbiologist? We use a wireless microscope, and we use the iPad as a viewer for that. And this, again, switches that world around. Instead of going out and collecting a specimen, bringing it into a lab and making observations of it alone and out of context, students can take an observations on a screen together as a team in its context without picking the flower, without killing the insect, without disturbing that environment. They can observe it together, make conclusions and deepen that inquiry in that site and go deeper in that site. If I ask a deeper question in this lab over here, I'm already away from where I can directly ask that question. And so if that question's being asked on site that's a greater piece of enabling the next inquiry to happen. And these are images captured from that device that later can show up in a lab report or maybe a Facebook post-- whatever a student wants to share and how they want to share it.
And now temperature readings, as I mentioned: we have atmospheric, we have longitudinal temperature that we can track with different devices that are on the site here. And then we can have specific surfaces being investigated. So our thermal imager captures images and displays that image on a screen and allows you to see immediately-- all these tools get pointed at someone's face. And then eventually the enthusiasm around pointing things at themselves shifts. You all will do it-- you laugh right now, but you'll be like 'How does this work? Look at this! Stick your tongue out!' 
Awesome! That's great! That's discovering and exploring the size of the box. What does this tool do? What does it do with things I'm familiar with-- my face or my friend's face. And then we get into this other step of pointing it out at the world to discover what it can teach us. So, these are some images captured here, and you can see indoor-outdoor living differences. And we'll get into that again out on, out on the island. And we have a very simple and cheap tool that'll tell us temperature really quickly. That'll maybe guide where we look a little deeper with the images.
So again, these tools are mostly on the same power platform and memory platform. They're portable. They all operate off-line. Some do have a capacity to go on-line but will still function off-line, which is key, 'cause there's internet on the island-- and bad cell service. And you see, hopefully, after that description the role that these play as being dedicated from each other. And you know that this team is doing this. And we move to another station. And teams change the tools they're looking at. They begin to tell a story together, which I think really increases the authentic narrative and integrity behind the inquiry that they're doing.
As I mentioned, there's a connection to-- between these tools and roles. And these tools and jobs, or skills. And I won't go over all of these, but I have seen all these tools in direct application in somebody's employment. The first time I saw one of these was from our diesel mechanic that was looking at our boat motor. And you know, it, it blew my mind. You know, I remember that still today. A clay hammer looking at the engine and, 'Oh yeah. This is what's going on. I need to-- these are the parts I need to order and bring back.' 
I'm like, 'Whoa! How did you do that? You know, I thought you'd have to take the boat out of the, out of the water, and you're going to have to look at all this stuff.' You know he moved ahead really quickly towards his diagnosis thinking scientifically about it, using a tool to observe what was invisible. The same with using these in wild land fire or using them in ground truthing data sets that are made in predictive models. Obviously GPS is used in our life every day. Many of you probably used it to get here today.
And these wireless microscopes, we have wired versions of them, too. But the wireless ones, these are used in quality control and manufacturing of small parts, and electronic circuit boards or custom measurement tools. And if you can look to see quality control and you can take an image with it, you have a file of how something was manufactured. And then you know if there's a recall or a problem, you can go back to that part of the line or that part of the equipment, procurement, and understand where to fix it.
So these aren't just, you know, 'Hey this is fun educational stuff. These things are really coming from the, you know, industrial and commercial sectors.' And I think that comes with a lot of integrity, too.
So again, pictures in the field of us using the tools and the different perspectives that it makes available. And it's not unique to just an outdoor center. As you can see, it can be on a campus or in an urban environment. And we do work very frequently in those places.
And if we were to have a discussion, I would, I would really want to know-- and we will discover that in the next four hours or so when we're walking: What technologies do you currently use? How important is it to implement them? What's on the edge? Where is your shifting baseline, as far as what you need to adopt? Maybe you don't need all this stuff. Maybe you just have some questions about the things you already have, or looking to adopt one or two technologies to better connect to your students, which is exactly what we found in this session last year. These two folks here, you know, I asked-- this is the first time they held an iPad. And I asked, I'm like, 'Why did you even come to this training? That's kind of far out if you want specific training on it, and you've never had one.' And their answer was really specifically, 'That's where my kids are. That's-- if I'm going to work with them, I gotta understand where they are and what matters to them.' And I think that's just such a positive approach towards technology. And on the other side of that, you know, they probably don't know her. But they're ideologically connected. You know, she's waiting, I think, for us to get to that spot and connect the dots.
So again, next steps would be-- how do we, you know, for a group coming to Upham, I would ask: How do we connect the things they observe here to the classroom they came from and are going back to? What research questions can be asked in both places? And what digital artifacts connect those experiences?
And lastly if we met again to go over that specifically, I would-- we would kind of agree on, we'd do a site analysis, site suitability analysis to look at these five ideas: What are the topics you want to look at with your grade level or your specific place? What are the sites you're going to collect data? You know, do you have a playground or are you by the Milwaukee River or the Menominee River? What does that look like? What tools or equipment are needed? Maybe you don't need all that. Now these are all boxed up because they can all fit together. But oftentimes we go places and just use one or two tools, because that's what makes sense in that site. What are the research questions we're going to begin to answer? And what's our report format? What's our expedition report format? Do we have a lab that we need to do a certain report for? Do we have a blog that we post in? Do we have a hard-copy we have to produce? Understanding the end-point of that story at the beginning of telling the story helps us collect data with intention, with those parameters in mind.
So you can find out more about this at our website. And you can see that is kind of long. FYI dot UWEX dot EDU forward slash ENVIRONMENTALEDUCATION forward slash. And that'll take you to the site you see here. And you can begin to, you know, connect with what we're doing, connect with what other people are doing. And if you're interested in it, download our forms if you're wanting to checkout one of these kits. And you can see here the kit itself. It has a stamp on it, you might have noticed, priority mail. So this kit was mailed for $13 to another place, and they mail it back to me. And then we serve it. So that's not too complicated. We want to keep it simplified so we can help distribute the material. It can be wherever. This could be mailed anywhere, and hopefully somewhere they're dialing it into their own place. And you know, the things I'm interested in are what those lessons look like in, in Sheboygan or La Crosse or Costa Rica or wherever people want to take 'em.
So there's some references here if you're-- you have really fine eyes, you can read all that. But if you want this type of information if that's the type of input you want, I can certainly send that to you electronically. Just let me know at the end of this session.
So once again I'll back up. I'll just leave it on this slide to conclude this part of our presentation. You can see my email address directly: justin.hougham@ces.uwex.edu. And I'll answer your questions directly or set you up with the rental program. 
And I think that takes us through this beginning introduction to our phase. After this, we'll get into the tools themselves. So thanks a lot, and I'll take any questions now if that's alright. 
(applause)