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GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

Supporting geography educators everywhere with current digital resources.

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sethdixon

I am a geography professor at Rhode Island College.

Election maps are telling you big lies about small things

In 2012, 160 counties cast about the same number of votes as the rest of the country. But, your run-of-the-mill election map won’t show you that.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

This is nothing new to most visitors to this site, but every four years we have a wonderful teaching moment to show how population density can change our interpretation of a map and the meaning of the data embedded in that map.  I preparation for next week, this article for the Washington Post as well as this one from the New York Times should help get students be better prepared for the onslaught of maps that we know are right around the corner, to properly assess and contextualize the geographic content in these maps.     

 

Tags: electoral, political, mapping.

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Why you’re probably wrong about levels of immigration in your country

In developed countries around the world, people think immigrant populations are much larger than they actually are.

 

Americans consistently mention immigration as one of the nation’s most pressing political concerns, and it has become a signature issue in the presidential campaign. But while many Americans consider immigration one of the biggest issues for the future president, surveys suggest that they also have little understanding of the scale of the problem. The United States wasn’t alone in this tendency to exaggerate.

 

Tags: migration, statistics, political.

Source: www.weforum.org

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What to Know About Diwali, the Festival of Lights

“Diwali, one of the biggest holidays in Indian culture, is a five-day festival of lights celebrated worldwide by Hindus, Sikhs and Jains. This year, the traditional day of Diwali falls on Oct. 30, though celebrations span the entire week leading up to and following the holiday, which marks the triumph of good over evil.”

Source: time.com

This video provides a good introduction to the incredibly important South Asia holiday of Diwali. 

 

Tags: culture, India, Hinduism, South Asia, festivals.

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Speaking the “Language” of Spatial Analysis

“Spatial analysis has always been a hallmark of GIS, the ‘numerical recipes’ which set GIS apart from other forms of computerized visualization and information management. With GIS we pose questions and derive results using a wide array of analytical tools to help us understand and compare places, determine how places are related, find the best locations and paths, detect and quantify patterns, and even to make spatial predictions.”

Source: blogs.esri.com

GIS is a key tool in spatial analysis, but it can also be a driving force in using math, science, technology and (yes) geography as interdisciplinary ways of teaching the curriculum.  StoryMaps can be rich with images and videos, but also filled with data at a variety of scales.  ESRI has share a “Maps we love” page with excellent examples of Story Maps and carefully explains WHY these maps work and HOW they were made.  Are you new to using the Analysis tool in ArcGIS Online?  Try this exercise on analyzing flood risk to guide you through some of the steps to learn what is possible for a project of your own.  What stories can you tell in this rich, visual format?  What visual template shown might lend itself best for that sort of project? 

 

Tags: mapping, GIS, ESRI, geography education, geospatial, edtech.

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Germany reunified 26 years ago, but some divisions are still strong

“While 75 percent of Germans who live in the east said that they considered their country’s reunification a success, only half of western Germans agreed. With eastern and western Germans blaming each other for past mistakes over the past two years, that frustration has likely increased. Younger citizens, especially — who do not usually identify themselves with their area of origin as strongly anymore — have grown worried about the persistent skepticism on both sides. But where do those divisions come from? And how different are eastern and western Germany today?”

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

This series of 10 maps (and 1 satellite image) highlights many of the cultural and economic divisions between East and West, despite efforts to in the last 26 years to smooth out these discrepancies. The social geographies imposed by the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall are still being felt from this relic border and will for years to come. 

 

Tags: Germany, industry, labor, economic, historical, political, borders.

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Reading the world in 196 books

“I set myself the challenge of trying to read a book from every country (well, all 195 UN-recognised states plus former UN member Taiwan) in a year to find out what I was missing.

With no idea how to go about this beyond a sneaking suspicion that I was unlikely to find publications from nearly 200 nations on the shelves of my local bookshop, I decided to ask the planet’s readers for help. I created a blog called A Year of Reading the World and put out an appeal for suggestions of titles that I could read in English.”

 

Tags: language, culture, worldwide, English.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

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Possibilism: Crash Course #2

“Possibilism, while accepting that physical environments have some affect on the outcomes for human social orders, they’re not the only factor by a long shot. Today, we’re talking about human agency, and the Human Geographers who developed the ideas that make up possibilism. Individuals and groups make the decisions that shape their societies, and while the world sometimes shapes these social orders, people also increasingly affect their world in return.”

Source: www.youtube.com

Just like that first Crash Course video on  environmental determinism, this video on environmental possibilism treats complex ideas in a cut-and-dry manner.  All the videos in Crash Course human geography series have an incredibly quick pace and these particular ideas need nuancing and (for most students) time to frame the factors and issues at hand. So if this is someone’s first introduction to environmental possibilism or determinism, they are likely to be both overwhelmed and given a slanted perspective on the topic.  I’m still holding out hope for when this series reaches the thematic content of human geography instead of the theoretical underpinnings of past geographical philosophies.

 

Tags: crash course, environmental determinism, environment, APHG, video.    

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The Environmental Cost of Consumption

Environmental artist J Henry Fair captures the beauty and destruction of industrial sites to illustrate the hidden impacts of the things we buy – the polluted air, destroyed habitats and the invisible carbon heating the planet

Source: www.theguardian.com

This artistic portrayal shows the extent of the massive modifications we’ve made to the landscape with some striking examples.  Pictured above is one of 17 images in this article that promotes the launch of the new book entitled, Industrial Scars: the Environmental Cost of Consumption.  In the image above we see mountaintop coal mining in West Virginia.  “This lonely stand of trees disappeared in barely a day. The small bulldozer on the upper level pushes loose material down to the loader, which scoops it up into the next earth mover in line, which will in turn dump it into a nearby ‘valley fill’, burying the stream there.” This might be the most beautiful and ugly set of images that you’ll see today. 

 

Tags: pollution, industry, sustainability, images, art, landscape, unit 6 industry.

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Dreadlocks Decision Raises Another Question: What Is Race?

Many experts agree with an appeals court’s decision last month that dreadlocks aren’t a common racial characteristic. But left undecided: What’s a common racial characteristic?

Source: www.npr.org

Race is both an omnipresent part of culture and surprisingly elusive.  “What is race?” might seem like an obvious question with concrete answers, but many see race as a socially constructed concept.  Even if it is socially constructed, how it is thought of has legal ramifications (as shown in the case regarding dreadlocks).  This is a good article that could start students asking the question “What is race?” and realize that it might be a hard question to answer.  

 

Tags: culture, race.

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