I have been a little quiet on the blogging front lately as Will Bamford and I have been working hard to complete the first stage of project we are working on with members of our Universities Geography department.

We have created a version of Locoblog, which we have christened geoblogger, that will allow us to record the journeys to school of 30 children during the course of a week of their journeys to and from school.

No only do we record the route but we have given the children the ability to blog their health status along the journeys together with an concerns about the environment.

The application also provides a twice daily health survey which is sent back to us along with the distance travelled.

We are going correlate their children’s school journeys with local traffic pollution data in the hope that we can make recommendations on the best routes to take and whether the local council needs to consider creating green corridors for such journeys. Here is the kit we have a amalgamated for the project which looks a bit scary all in one place .

The experiment will take place in 1 week periods in each season over the next year with the first one starting next week. I will blog more details and perhaps some preliminary results during the course of the trial as it will hopefully provide some interesting insights in using mobile phones for fieldwork recording and experiences of using this technology with children