Getting Started with PBC

The Rural School and Community Trust. “Encouraging Place-Based Learning,” (2003).

“‘Place-based’ education is learning that is rooted in what is local–the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place. The community provides the context for learning, student work on community needs and interests, and community members serve as resources and partners in every aspect of teaching and learning.”

The best way to understand the potential of augmenting places with digital representations is to start doing it yourself with an inexpensive GPS receiver, like the Garmin ForeTrex 101 shown on the right. We like the Garmin because it is waterproof, runs for a long time on AAA batteries (useful for fieldwork away from the power grid) and is small and light enough to be worn on the wrist or back of the hand. This puts the unit in a good position to receive signals from the satellites, and leaves hands free for photography, sketching, controlling a bicycle or whatever.

GPS receivers like this one will not show where you are on a map. But they do keep track of your position, creating what is called a “track log.” Think of it like a trail of breadcrumbs. With an interface cable, you can download your track logs to your computer, and keep a record of where you’ve been. With still more equipment, these track logs can also be used to create geocoded photographs, as discussed in the next section.

From our point of view, one of the most interesting things that you can do with a GPS receiver is to create waypoints. A waypoint is a fixed location. It has a latitude, a longitude and a name. As you explore, you can leave waypoints and later find your way back to them with your GPS receiver. If you take a train or a bus to a new city, for example, you can leave a waypoint at the station and then explore to your heart’s content, knowing that your GPS can always show you how far it is to the station, and in which direction it lies. You can mark bookshops, coffee bars, museums, libraries and archives or other points of interest. If you know you are travelling to a new place, you can make waypoints for things that you want to see and upload them to your GPS receiver. You can leave a waypoint at your car when you park in a large parking lot. You can drive around on a Saturday morning, leaving waypoints at all of the garage sales and then find your way back to each one.

You can also use track logs and waypoints to create your own maps. You might identify places and routes that have personal significance or which are important to your family or to communities to which you belong. You might, for example, leave waypoints at the houses you lived in, the schools that your parents went to, the place where your great-grandmother was born or the place where she was buried. If you upload your waypoints to your computer, you can share them with relatives, friends or community members, or you can make your own maps to share with other people.

The map shows the track log of a walk from the Masonville area of London, Ontario to the campus of the University of Western Ontario as a solid black line. The data were created with a Garmin ForeTrex 101 GPS receiver. The tracklog was first transferred to a computer using the freely available TrackDownload program from WWMX. This program allowed us to save the track log as a GPX file.

The GPX file was then uploaded to the GPS Visualizer website. This website allows you to plot your own track logs or waypoint files over the top of map data from other sources. In this case, the base map was automatically plotted by choosing the “Canada: NRCan political + contour lines” data set.

If you also have access to a digital camera, you can collect geocoded photographs, too. The screenshot below shows the same walk from Masonville to the UWO campus. After the track log was downloaded, the photographs were automatically geocoded using the freely available Location Stamper program from WWMX. This program allowed us to combine our track log information from the GPX file with our digital photographs. Notice that the WWMX program makes use of the Microsoft MapPoint server to get the base map. The track log is the same, but it is now displayed in a different context. Each one of the purple circles on the map marks the spot where a photo was taken (174 in all). Using this program, you can click on a photo and see where it was taken. WWMX also has programs to help you create your own travelogues and stories, standalone photo slide shows with maps and tags.

Why would historians want to collect geocoded photographs of present-day places? There are at least four good reasons.

1. A collection of geocoded photographs can serve as a visual notebook for a particular place at a particular time, which can be useful for historians who do fieldwork on place, environment, landscape, agriculture or technology.
   

2. Since every place is comprised entirely of stuff from the past, it is often possible to make inferences about past events by studying traces in the present, or by comparing a present place with past representations of that same place. In a sense, geocoded photographs can serve as primary sources for some kinds of historical inference.
   

3. A large collection of geocoded photographs of a present-day place can also be used as a reference tool to identify where historical photographs were taken.
   

4. And finally, if your geocoded photographs survive in the archival record, they might be an invaluable primary source for future historians.