Search

GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

Supporting geography educators everywhere with current digital resources.

Open Search
Author

sethdixon

I am a geography professor at Rhode Island College.

VIDEO: My Dear Kyrgyzstan

My Dear

“Emil is a social media-obsessed entrepreneur in one of the most remote places on earth: An abandoned Soviet mining village in Kyrgyzstan. Emil has returned to put his village on the map as an international tourist destination.” SOURCE: MailChimp

This delightful video shows the former Soviet mining town of Jyrgalan and a local entrepreneur that wants to revitalize the village economy, bring in the outside world, and make is home a tourist destination.  It serves several purposes for a geography teacher.  One, it’s a great portal into a Central Asian country where most of my students don’t have any real reference points.  Two, the video highlights important geographic concepts such as tourism’s impact on indigenous cultures and globalization’s impact on previously isolated locations.  Three, this is a great case study for a cultural landscape analysis.  The video has some incredible juxtapositions; nomads wearing traditional clothes encountering adventure tourists outfitted in Patagonia gear, people in town cutting grass with scythes as well as gas lawn mowers, and traditional architectural styles intermixed with signs of modernity such as satellite antennas.  The physical and cultural landscapes in this are absolutely stunning and worth the twelve minutes of your time.

GeoEd Tags: landscape, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, video, tourism, globalization.

My_Dear_Kyrgyz

0

Exploring Landscapes through Sport

“Way Back Home is the incredible new riding clip from Danny MacAskill, it follows him on a journey from Edinburgh back to his hometown Dunvegan, in the Isle of Skye.”

I love Danny Macaskill’s video that puts Scotland’s cultural and physical landscapes on display.  This extreme sports clip is in many ways more about the places that are being shown that infused with gorgeous physical landscapes.  The architecture, the historic sites, the everyday towns, and transportation infrastructure all speak to the importance of landscape in creating a place that is beloved by its people.

GeoED Tags: landscape, sport, UK, video.

Not surprisingly, I’m also a fan of this other video, The Ridge.  The Ridge is far more about the physical landscapes of Scotland than the cultural landscapes, but both are stunning.

“#TheRidge is the brand new film from Danny Macaskill… For the first time in one of his films Danny climbs aboard a mountain bike and returns to his native home of the Isle of Skye in Scotland to take on a death-defying ride along the notorious Cuillin Ridgeline.“

0

These students make maps for the Philippines and Belize. They never leave campus to do it.

mapathon-1

“With Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ humming in the background, about two dozen students at George Washington University traced skinny lines and square-shaped landmarks on a satellite image of a rural chunk of Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines. They are in the early stages of piecing together a map of the region where half of the country’s food is grown but where most people live in poverty.

The students carefully scanned the photos to scope out buildings and roads tucked between thick trees. The task is painstaking but necessary to create an up-to-date map. This corner of the Philippines — like large swaths of the planet — does not have any recent digital maps.” SOURCE: Washington Post

Crowd-sourced mapping is increasingly an important resource during an emergency and one of the best ways to put geographic knowledge and geospatial skills in action.  Many high school and college students around the country are learning mapping skills by creating maps for places that aren’t well-mapped and in great need.  Poorer places are often not as well mapped out by the commercial cartographic organizations and these are oftentimes the places that are most vulnerable to natural disasters.  Relief agencies depend on mapping platforms to handle the logistics of administering aid and assessing the extent of the damage and rely on these crowd-sourced data sets.  My students and I are working on this over the weekend; can you join in and help?  The projects that are marked urgent by the Red Cross are all in Haiti right now.  Here are is a video playlist that explains the project and how you can help if you are new to OpenStreetMap (OSM).  The embedded TEDx talk below discusses the advantages of using OSM in geography teaching.

GeoEd Tags: cartography, disasters, mapping, STEM.

0

On the edge of America, census begins in a tiny Alaska town

Alaska

“The first Americans to be counted in the 2020 census live in [Toksook Bay, Alaska], a tiny community of 661 on the edge of the American expanse. Their homes are huddled together in a windswept Bering Sea village, painted vivid lime green, purple or neon blue to help distinguish the signs of life from a frigid white winterscape that makes it hard to tell where the frozen sea ends and the village begins. Once the spring thaw hits, the town empties as many residents scatter for traditional hunting and fishing grounds, and the frozen ground that in January makes it easier to get around by March turns to marsh that’s difficult to traverse. The mail service is spotty and the internet connectivity unreliable, which makes door-to-door surveying important. For those reasons, they have to start early here.” SOURCE: AP News.

This article is a reminder that while we are on preparing for the constitutionally-mandated 2020 census (get ready for updated maps everyone!!), the census is tasked with counting everyone.  Some populations such as this indigenous village in Alaska are harder to count than others.

Questions to Ponder: What are other populations that might be under-represented in the census?  What would be measures that census employees could take to count those people?  How does the census improve our ability to understand geographic patterns?

GeoEd Tags: indigenous, census.

0

99 Percent Invisible: Mini-stories

99PISocialShareImage_V1

The 99 Percent Invisible podcast is an excellent one for geography teachers as well as students.  So many episodes deal with the unspoken things that make our world the way it is—unnoticed architecture and design with a heavy dose of urbanism and the built environment.  The particular episode has four “mini-stories” and each of them has some compelling geographic/landscape component to it.

OMNIBUS

Also, here is a another great podcast with some trivia nerdiness from Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy champ who authored Maphead and presented at NCGE) is part of the Omnibus Project, a podcast with some excellent geographic nuggets (disclaimer: the language and content for this podcast is not always classroom-friendly).  Here are some geographic episodes about Cincinnati Chili, Alexander von Humboldt, Induced Demand (traffic), the Qibla, the Blue Men of the Sahara, the Port Chicago Disaster, Bir Tawil, the Sentinelese, and the Darien Gap.

GeoEd Tags: 99pi, podcast.

cover_medium
Only in Cincinnati will I eat this!  Listen to the Cincinnati Chili episode!
0

The Trails Leaving Venezuela

Venezuela Migrants

“The rich were the first to leave. They wired their savings abroad and hopped on international flights. The middle class departed next. They went on buses, sometimes riding for days across several countries. The poor remained. They stayed as the economy collapsed, food got scarcer, medicine shortages turned deadly and the electricity cut out for days at a time. But finally, they too began to exit Venezuela. They simply walked out. The departure of the caminantes, or walkers, began slowly in 2017 with young men hoping to find jobs and send money home.

Now women and children, the sick and the elderly also are taking their chances, expanding an exodus that already is one of the biggest mass migrations in modern history. Each day an estimated 5,000 people flee.” SOURCE: LA Times

The economic, political, and demographic crisis in Venezuela might not be at the top of the headlines anymore, that that isn’t because the situation has gone away, but it just has become ‘normal.’   This article is an in-depth look at the lives of those fleeing Venezuela on foot into Colombia.

GeoEd Tags: migration, Colombia, Venezuela, refugees, South America.

0

Mapping the Wind

EarthNull

It is incredibly cold in New England right now.  How can maps help us to understand the weather patterns we are facing?  How is what we are facing in our community connected to global patterns?  Maps help us to contextualize information and understand processes.  So to investigate this our freezing wind conditions we will look at a series of online resources.

  1. Dynamic Wind Map of USA (Visualization).
  2. Interactive wind map (Ventusky).
  3. Interactive wind map (WindyTy).
  4. Digital Globe with Wind patterns (Null School)

GeoEd TAGS: physical,  weather and climate, mapping, visualization.

0

Why 40% of Vietnamese People Have the Same Last Name

Vietnam

“In the United States, the most popular last name is Smith. As per the 2010 census, about 0.8 percent of Americans have it. In Vietnam, the most popular last name is Nguyen. The estimate for how many people answer to it? Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the country’s population. The 14 most popular last names in Vietnam account for well over 90 percent of the population. The 14 most popular last names in the US? Fewer than 6 percent.”  SOURCE: ATLAS OBSCURA

So many things are cultural beyond language, religion, and ethnicity, but those are the biggies in book chapters and in the curriculum.  Should you strike up a conversation with that stranger in the elevator?  How far from home is it appropriate for children to go from the house unattended?  What clothes are appropriate for a teacher to wear in the classroom?  These are all questions about cultural norms, but we don’t think about them as cultural at times because we are so used to our own cultural context that it seems natural.  The importance of last names and naming conventions aren’t natural but are created by cultural norms and institutions.

GeoEd Tags: cultural norms, culture, Vietnam.

So here’s the condensed version from Atlas Obscura:

The entire idea of a family name was unknown to most of the world unless you were conquered by a place that used them. Those conquerors included the Romans, the Normans, the Chinese, and later the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Germans, and the Americans. It was the Chinese who gave Vietnam family names.

The last name, in Vietnam, is there, but just isn’t that important. And when it’s not that important, you might as well change it if a new last name might help you in some way. This may or may not be a continuation of the way names were used before the Chinese came—we really don’t know—but ever since, Vietnamese people have tended to take on the last name of whoever was in power at the time. It was seen as a way to show loyalty, a notion which required the relatively frequent changing of names with the succession of rulers. After all, you wouldn’t want to be sporting the last name of the previous emperor.

“This tradition of showing loyalty to a leader by taking the family name is probably the origin of why there are so many Nguyens in Vietnam,” says O’Harrow. Guess what the last ruling family in Vietnam was? Yep, the Nguyễn Dynasty, which ruled from 1802 to 1945. It’s likely that there were plenty of people with the last name Nguyen before then, as there were never all that many last names in Vietnam to begin with, but that percentage surely shot up during the dynasty’s reign.

0

Different Dialects

This is a flippant, silly video (with some language that you might not want young kids hearing), but it shows that the speakers of the same language can still has some have some significant barriers to understanding each other.  Dialects of a same language have different pronunciations but also distinct vocabulary that is often place-specific.  Dialects and accents create variety in cultural geography that makes traveling around the world enticing and exhilarating because there is always something else to learn about this crazy Earth.

GeoEd Tags: language, Australia, Oceania, video.

0

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑