GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

“Stratfor Eurasia Analyst Eugene Chausovsky examines the Caspian Sea’s large energy reserves and its conflicting maritime boundaries.”

Source: www.youtube.com

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world’s largest lake went from having just two countries on its shores to five. Dividing the maritime borders has been especially difficult since the Caspian Sea has rich energy reserves and this lake will remain a place of strategic interest for many regional powers.  This video has been added to my ESRI StoryMap that spatially organizes place-based videos for the geography classroom.    

Tags: borders, political, geopolitics, Central Asia, energy, resources, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, economic, water.

“When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor. An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian).  Minna Sundberg, creator of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, a story set in a lushly imagined post-apocalyptic Nordic world, has drawn the antidote to the boring linguistic tree diagram.”

Source: mentalfloss.com

Languages are interconnected and often share common roots and ancestries.  This artistic rendering of the Indo-European language tree (Hi-Res) is an attempt to visually show the linguistic connections between languages and language families.  

Tags: language, art, culture, infographic.

“Most state borders were drawn centuries ago, long before the country was fully settled, and often the lines were drawn somewhat arbitrarily, to coincide with topography or latitude and longitude lines that today have little to do with population numbers.  Most state borders were drawn centuries ago, long before the country was fully settled, and often the lines were drawn somewhat arbitrarily, to coincide with topography or latitude and longitude lines that today have little to do with population numbers.”

Tags: cartography, mapping, visualization, regions, gerrymandering, political, mapping, census, density.

Source: www.slate.com

We know where the bodies are buried … take a virtual tour of world cemeteries that host famous artists and rogues

Tag: cemetery.

Source: www.smithsonianmag.com

Utah’s Fantasy Canyon features mudstone eroded into bizarre shapes. This one’s called “Flying Witch”. #Halloween

Tags: physical, geomorphology, erosion, landforms, Utah.

Source: twitter.com

“The Mexican tradition celebrates the dead and welcomes their return to the land of the living once a year. Enticing them to make the trip is where the food, drink and musical offerings come in.”

Source: www.npr.org

Like many things in Mexico, the celebrations around the Day of the Dead are a combination of indigenous and Spanish traditions that collide to make something that is uniquely Mexican.  This podcast goes through the symbolism in the cultural artifacts that are such a vibrant part of the festivities.   

Tags: Mexico, folk culture, culture, podcast.

“Did you miss Wednesday’s #aphgchat (like me)?  If so, you can get caught up with this archive of the chat.  As a bonus, I also added my absolute favorite resources for each unit at the tail end of the chat.” 

Tags: social media, teacher training, geography education, APHG.

Source: storify.com

“If ever there was a demonstration of the power of science, it is the course of the fight billed ‘Mankind v AIDS’. Until 1981 the disease (though already established in parts of Africa) was unknown to science. Within a decade it passed from being seen as primarily a threat to gay men, and then to promiscuous heterosexuals, to being a plague that might do to some parts of Africa what the Black Death did to medieval Europe. But now, though 1.6m people a year still die of it, that number is on a downward trajectory­, and AIDS rarely makes the headlines any more. How was this achieved?  The answer has two parts: sound science and international co-operation.”

Source: www.economist.com

The Ebola epidemic has dominated headlines recently.  In their haste, it has been lost on that media the scary medical story of the 20th century (AIDS) that was going to doom Africa is now a success story.  Some of the stories about Ebola have treated Africa as one monolithic place–Africa is not a single story.  

Tags:  medical, diffusion, Africa, regions, perspective.

“Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.”

Source: www.youtube.com

To gain a global perspective inherently requires understanding multiple perspectives.  Africa is frequently portrayed as ‘the other’ but also homogenized within a single narrative that ‘flattens’ truth.  How can we teach and learn about other places in a way that develops geographic empathy and shows the many stories of that can belong to any one place? 

Tags: Africa, perspective, TED.