Friday, April 26, 2013

Histgeog: Making the connection



Image above: The discovery of America map 1498. From the Old Maps Online site.

Related links
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Humsteach blog

GeogSplace blog
 
Geographical thinking Scoop.it  
Spatial literacy Scoop.it  
History and geography Scoop.it 
Spatial Education and technology Scoop.it   

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:

manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I?? Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'




Recently I have come across the term 'histgeog' to describe the connection between history and geography in the school curriculum. In particular, the word highlights the interdependent connection between history and geography. It is true to say that one cannot understand the history of a place without an understanding of geography of that place and vice versa. Whilst this connection has been explored previously on Spatialworlds, this posting will just list several useful sites to make the connection between history and geography. As we talk about a connected curriculum during the implementation of the Australian Curriculum and the issues of a crowded curriculum, the technological connection ‘touchstone’ between the two disciplines becomes of great interest and importance.

These are but a few of the ever growing sites relevant to histgeog - in the old days we would  call it historical geography!


In this fascinating set of images, Dutch artist and historian Jo Teeuwisse merges her passions literally by superimposing World War II photographs on to modern pictures of the where the photos were originally taken. An interesting blending of place and change over time. This serves as a reminder that places are rich with history; to understand the geography of a place, one must also know it's history (and vice versa). 

* British have invaded nine out of ten countries 
This map shows that Britain has invaded all but 22 countries in the world in its long and colourful history, new research has found.

* An Interactive Map of the Blitz
Where and When the Bombs Fell on London.

New nations seem to pop up with alarming regularity. At the start of the 20th century, there were only a few dozen independent sovereign states on the planet; today, there are nearly 200! Once a nation is established, they tend to stick around for awhile, so a nation disappearing is quite uncommon. It’s only occurred a handful of times in the last century. But when they do, they completely vanish off the face of the globe: government, flag, and all. Here then, in no particular order, are the top ten countries that had their moment in the sun but are, alas, no more.

This is a video introduction to www.historypin.com which might just prove to be a very useful and important project.  It's historical geography powered by collaborative mapping that is infused with social media dynamics.  Backed by Google, they are geo-tagging old photos to recreate the historical geographies of all places and comparing them with current street view images.  You can search by topic, place or date...this has the potential to be very big.

Geospatial technologies allow people to view phenomenon never before seen in remote places.  How does this type of exploration promote spatial thinking?  Why does scale matter in this analysis?   

Google Earth's Timeline, if you haven't discovered that feature will allow you to compare and contrast imagery from an area from the present 2010/11 to 1993-1995 images.  Click the 'clock' button and a timeline that you can slide to the past appears.  Nice historical possibilities with this option. Also watch this Vimeo on using Historypin


How have women's political rights changed around the globe over time.This interactive map shows the long history of the fight for suffrage and political representation around the globe. Click and drag on the year slider to see the changing face of women's political representation over the years.

A great site to explore the use of GIS in the study of history.

 The OldMapsOnline Portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world. It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.

The Spatial History Project at Stanford University is a place for a collaborative community of scholars to engage in creative visual analysis to further research in the field of history.

 This database of global wars and conflicts is searchable through space and time.  You can drag and click both the map and timeline to locate particular battles and wars, and then read more information about that conflict.  This resource would be a great one to show students and let them explore to find what they see as interesting.

 See Rome as it looked in 320 AD and fly down to see famous buildings and monuments in 3D. Select the 'Ancient Rome 3D' layer under Gallery in Google Earth.

 An Interactive Graphic Showing The Evolution of Western Dance Music Over The Last 100 Years in Under 20 seconds...

A fantastic interactive map with population charts that show the massive explosion in urbanization since 1950 until the present.

How much do you agree with the author's assertion that geography explains the foreign affairs of the U.S.?  Is there any environmental determinism in this argument?  

* Rates of travel in the past
 In this age of fast travel and instant digital communications, we tend to forget that not so long ago, distances were subjectively very different.

* Neatline
Neatline allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines. As a suite of add-on tools for Omeka, it opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation.


More hisgeog sites will pop up on my Histgeog Scoop.it as the months go by.



Friday, April 19, 2013

Scooping spatial



Image above: The Scoop.it interface for Spatial Education and technology.

Related links
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Humsteach blog

GeogSplace blog

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:
 

manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??

Brisbane, Australia: S: 27º 29' E: 153º 08'


Using Scoop.it to scoop spatial technology

Over the past month I have been using Scoop.it website for my students to research their geographical issues. I continue to be impressed by the potential of this great site to gather sites of interest - many of which I would never have come across by a normal Google search. For quite some time I have been a fan of Dr Seth Dixon's Geographical Education Scoop.it. His Scoop.it continues to feed me some great information and sites every day via an email. 

The time had come to start curating myself, so last week I started four Scoop.it topics. They are  on Spatial education and technology,  Spatial literacy, Geographical thinking and Hisgeography. Already I am getting some great feeds (blogs, Instagrams, Twitter feeds, Facebook links and the normal Internet sites) through the Suggested content facility of the Scoop.it site which is fed through to my topics each day. As well as the automatic Suggested content that appears for review on a daily basis (to bin or scoop), one can add Posts manually to the topic when anything else is found on the Internet of interest to the topic. 
As time goes I hope that these Scoop.it topics will grow into really useful curated site as an adjunct to the Spatialworlds blog.  I highly recommend Scoop.it as a tool for curating and harvesting sites on whatever takes ones fancy. Feel free to follow my two Scoop.it topics at:
 http://www.scoop.it/t/spatial-education-and-technology  
 http://www.scoop.it/t/spatial-literacy
http://www.scoop.it/t/geographical-thinking
http://www.scoop.it/t/hisgeography





Monday, April 15, 2013

Striking a balance: Sustainability and geography




Image above: Sustainability in the Australian Curriculum: Geography; finding a balance between environmental and economical sustainability, and creating a socially just world.

Related links
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Humsteach blog

GeogSplace blog

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:
 

manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??

Brisbane, Australia: S: 27º 29' E: 153º 08'


Sustainability in geography: a good fit!  

Geography sees sustainability broader than the environment as an isolated ‘thing’. It is the interdependency of the quadruple bottom line(QBL) that is often advocated as the approach in geography.

When discussing sustainabiltiy, the quadruple bottom line takes into consideration the following factors: 
1. Environmental

2. Social

3.Cultural (including governance) 

4. Economic. 

Some say that sustainable development is dead with the current wave of conservative ideals and economic prosperity throughout the world; the "What's In It for Me" (WIIFM) attitude seems to be growing. However it is certainly not dead in the Australian Curriculum: Geography where it is clearly stated in Aim 5, that:


The F-10 Australian Curriculum: Geography aims to ensure that students develop:
  • as informed, responsible and active citizens who can contribute to the development of the development of an environmentally and economically sustainable, and socially just world.

The draft curriculum goes on to say that:
In the F-10 Australian Curriculum: Geography, an understanding of sustainability is developed in the following ways:
  • Sustainability is both a goal and a way of thinking about how to progress towards that goal.
  • Progress towards environmental sustainability depends on the maintenance or restoration of the environmental functions that sustain all life and human wellbeing (economic and social).
  • An understanding of the causes of unsustainability requires a study of the environmental processes producing the degradation of an environmental function; the human actions that have initiated these processes; and the attitudinal, demographic, social, economic and political causes of these human actions. These can be analysed through the framework of human-environment systems.
  • There are a variety of contested views on how progress towards sustainability should be achieved, and these are often informed by worldviews such as stewardship.

Here are a few links to support the teaching of sustainability in geography:

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Beyond colouring in! Creative Geography teaching



Image above: A luminescent map of the World's earthquakes since 1898. A century's worth of earthquakes (a staggering 203,186 of them) across the globe.

Related links
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Humsteach blog

GeogSplace blog

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:

manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??

Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'



Teaching geography creatively (not just busy work!)

The following sites are some useful sites for teaching geography creatively, many of which are excellent for introductory geography in the primary school. These sites provide amazing opportunties to do some really meaningful and worthwhile geographical studies in the classroom, learning we could not imagine before the wonders of technology, including spatial. Many of the sites I have gleaned from Larry Ferlazzo, a teacher in the US who continues to post some great teaching resources on his edublog.
* 101 Creatively simple ways to teach Geography: Some great activities and ideas from Tony Cassidy in the UK.
* Top Geography blogs with heaps of ideas for the classroom

* Geographical Media is the newest addition to The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy list. After you register (which is a free and easy process) you can see which topics are being covered in the news media in different parts of the world, and compare the differences. The site seems to have a number of other features — and it’s not particularly intuitive how to navigate through them — but the site has a lot of potential.

* Map Battle is a very easy-to-use tool to create geography games online. It’s like a less-fancy The Traveler IQ Challenge game.


*  Newsy is a site that — in short videos — compares how major news events are covered by media throughout the world. In some ways, it’s similar to Link TV, which is also of use in the classroom.

* The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”. The speaking is pretty fast and relatively high-level, so it’s probably only accessible to advanced English Language Learners.

* Hypercities is a neat “mashup” of what various cities have looked like over the past several hundred years. By using a “slider,” you can choose a year, and then various images of that city from that time are shown.


* Safe Drinking Water, a site developed by the Academy of Sciences to highlight worldwide water issues. It has several good videos that are closed-captions, along with an atlas showing which countries have less or more access to water resources.

* Geobeats. It has a huge collection of short travel videos from around the world.

* What The World Eats, an online slideshow from Time magazine that shows families from fifteen different countries, along with what they eat during one week and its cost. This site can be used to initiate a discussion on economic inequities; use in compare/contrast activities; and take advantage of it to develop new vocabulary.
* Places Of A Lifetime. It highlights major cities from all over the world sharing information, images, and videos. It also has short and simple quizzes users can take.


* Mapdango, a “mash-up” — a combination of a variety of web applications. It’s a neat geographical and map search engine that, after you enter the location you’re interested in, will show you the area’s weather, areas of interest from Wikipedia, Flickr photos, and other items. One particularly useful feature is that it shows all of the above connected to its geographical location on a map, too.

* Visual Geography is a nice site with images, information, and quizzes about 85 countries around the world. I A feature called “Compare” allows you to pick any two countries and easily compare their demographic data with a click of the mouse.


* McDougal Littell’s Class Zone. This site has animated maps, online activities, animations — all with text support for audio. Just click on a subject and a state, and you’ll be amazed at what they offer online.

* Maps: Finding Our Place In The World Wonderful online activities it offers are too numerous to mention. Just be sure to explore all the links on its “sidebar.”


* Geography Challenge from a magazine called Mental Floss. It has a series of good map games that are a little more challenging than the ones on IKnowThat.


* Nations Illustrated. It has over 7,000 photos from all over the world. They’re categorized by country, and they’re free to use for non-commercial purposes.


* The Zero Footprint Kids Calculator  It would be difficult to develop a more accessible web tool for people to figure out their own ecological footprint.


* The Virtual Smithsonian. It’s a fantastic multimedia window into the artifacts, and their stories, held by the Smithsonian Institution.