Virtual Field Trips for Geoscience Education
Helping our species navigate the promise and peril of the Anthropocene
Welcome to Earth To Tommy: about Tom Ruberto
I am Tom Ruberto, a geoscience professor, science communicator, and media producer holding a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Geology. Producing virtual field trips and digital media assets for geoscience education is the core of my work. My research centers on the workflows used to create them and on testing their effectiveness as a learning modality.
Ruberto Geoscience Research Lab
The Ruberto Geoscience Research Lab is a research in undergraduate education (RUE) initiative at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, directed by Dr. Thomas Ruberto. Roughly fifteen undergraduate researchers from several disciplines build immersive virtual field experiences for fellow students who cannot get to the field because of cost, work, family, access, or distance.
Geoscience at Chandler-Gilbert CC
I teach geology, field geology, physical geography, meteorology, climate and weather, and GIS at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, where I serve as lead geoscience faculty. This section covers the courses I teach, the field trips I run each semester, and the three degree paths I oversee, with links out to CGCC's official pages for requirements and advising.
Models & Maps
Deep time, plate motion, and rates of change are hard to hold in your head from a description alone. So I build things you can operate: models, simulations, and tools that test whether a number deserves the confidence it projects. This section holds those, alongside the best work published by NASA, NOAA, the USGS, and the research groups doing this well.
Virtual Learning
This section is a working resource for anyone building virtual field experiences. It opens with a curated survey of geoscience virtual field trips worth studying. The remaining pages cover the workflows, hardware, and software behind them, a vocabulary for the field, and a body of research for anyone who needs to justify this work to a department chair or a funder.
Navigating the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is the story of what we know about a changing planet and how we know it. Here you will find curated books and documentaries, guidance on telling a reliable climate claim from an unreliable one, and the work being done in response, which gets far less attention than the problem, along with places worth traveling to experience firsthand.