Being visual - graphicacy

 Image above: Amazing maps

Related links to Spatialworlds 
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
GeogSpace
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website

Geographical thinking Scoop.it  

Spatial literacy Scoop.it  

History and geography Scoop.it 

Spatial Education and technology Scoop.it   
Just real interesting Scoop.it

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:

manning@chariot.net.au    

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


The art of visualising data

This posting is dedicated to the capacity of spatial technology to visualise data - the graphicacy skill/art of geography using modern technology. 
 
"Graphicacy is concerned with the capacities people require in order to interpret and generate information in the form of graphics. Our society is becoming increasingly reliant on graphics to communicate information. Until recently, words and numbers were the main vehicles for communication – compared with graphics, they have long been relatively easy to produce and distribute. However, advances in information and communications technology and visualisation techniques now mean that graphics are far more readily available and more widely used than ever before." 

 Here is an interesting YouTube on Graphicacy, tied in with literacy and numeracy.

To illustrate graphicacy, here are some great examples from my Spatial Literacy Scoop.it

* An interactive representation of the urban world

An Urban World: UNICEF's new data visualization of urban population growth over the next 40 years. This graphic depicts countries and territories with 2050 urban populations exceeding 100,000. Circles are scaled in proportion to urban population size. Hover over a country to see how urban it is (percentage of people living in cities and towns) and the size of its urban population (in millions).

* Population pyramids: Powerful predictors ofthe future 

Population statistics are like crystal balls -- when examined closely, they can help predict a country's future (and give important clues about the past). Kim Preshoff explains how using a visual tool called a population pyramid helps policymakers and social scientists make sense of the statistics, using three different countries' pyramids as examples.

* World Interactive map

Interactive Map of the World, through a flash based Map Viewer application which provides a bird's eye view of every country in the world. It provides country facts such as population, area, GDP, time zone etc.

* Visualisation of world migration

To illustrate the network of globe-trotting journeys, Abel and Sander generated the above fantastic graphic for 2005 to 2010. Migration flows for different world regions are shown as color-coded arcs, with lines that begin close to the circle's edge depicting outgoing migrations (as shown with the arrows for "Central America"). Fatter arcs represent larger migrations and the numbered tick marks indicate how many millions of people are involved

* Someone’s best maps of 2013

"Some beautiful, information-dense cartography, which provide a moment of self-reflection like a giant, geographic mirror.”  Seth Dixon

* When people try to draw the world

People get the general shape of the world when the draw a map of the world from memory.

* Amazing maps

Maps after maps, some quirky some just plain interesting and useful.

Searching for skills

Image above: Sunrise over Sydney Harbour.


Related sites to the Spatialworlds project

Spatialworlds website

21st Century Geography Google Group

Australian Geography Teachers' Association website

'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website

Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website

Humsteach blog

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter 

Email contact

manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??

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

Searching for the 21^st Century geographical skills

In many of the Spatialworlds posting we have talked about the concepts in the Australian Curriculum: Geography and their importance in developing geographical thinking. In this posting I want to explore the generic skills involved in the teaching and learning of geography in the 21^st Century.  

The Australian Curriculum: History clearly articulated the generic skills of history and embedded them in a developmental manner very effectively in their F-10 historical skills strand. The historical skills identified in the ACARA document are continuity and change, cause and effect, significance, perspectives, empathy and contestability. 

The challenge for geography is to identify a list of generic skills that goes to the core of geographical education. When anyone asks a geography teacher; “What skills do you want your students to develop”, we should be able to articulate those skills clearly and coherently. We are very good at saying we want our students to understand maps, undertake inquiry, draw graphs, do cross-sections etc but geographical skills are much much more in the 21^st Century world of geography. This posting is not intended to develop a comprehensive and finite list. Rather, it intends to be a useful starting point for teachers to begin to think about the generic geographical skills to be developed in the teaching of geography.  I would also hope that it will provide an opportunity to debate what we are actually trying to develop in our students in terms of skills for citizenship and living.  I would suggest that in geography these skills, as is the case with the concepts, make geography geography

. 

Here is a go at making a generic geography skills list!

• Conceptualisation: to discuss geographical events, phenomena and places using the geographical concepts of place, space, environment, interconnection, sustainability, change and scale.
• Comparability: to compare and contrast geographical places, processes, features, events and spatial arrangements.
• Cause and effect: to identify causation and impact of geographical processes, spatial variations and events.
• Contestability: to discern that there are multiple explanations for geographical phenomena and be prepared to discuss multiple causes, interpretations and futures.
• Empathy: to be empathetic to the impact of geography on humans and have an understanding of a variety of views and impressions.
• Futures: to be able to project forward and suggest possible futures for whatever geography studied.
• Graphicacy: to evaluate and use data in the form of maps, graphs or other visual representations of the earth.
• Questioning: to ask the inquiry questions of what, where, why and so what?
• Source/data critiquing: the ability to collect, interrogate and analyse data and visual representations (maps, visualisations, images). 
• Whyabouts: to explore the ‘why of the where’ when investigating the reasons for the location of geographical features, places and spaces.

Hopefully this list and interpretations of the skills will start some discussion of generic geographical skills. They are certainly going to be part of professional learning for geography I hope to conduct in the future. I should emphasise that this listing is just me thinking out aloud and not any official work of ACARA as they develop the Australian Curriculum: Geography.