John Krygier

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Multimedia Resources for Geography and Earth Science Education.

Abstract Geography and earth science educators are simultaneously faced with increasing scrutiny of teaching, new educational standards and a plethora of new teaching methods such as computer multimedia. While there have been calls for the use of multimedia in geography and earth science education, few explicit guidelines detail how to actually begin designing, implementing and evaluating educational multimedia in the classroom. This paper describes an approach to educational multimedia design focused on a coherent set of multimedia design standards informed by an array of evaluation functions. Such design and evaluation standards should be shaped by broader educational and content (geography and earth science) goals. Our approach to design and evaluation serves as a fundamental step in examining the possibilities of multimedia in the geography and earth science classroom.

Cartographic Multimedia and Praxis in Human Geography and the Social Sciences

The most vital issues in multimedia cartography are not technical issues. Cartographic multimedia has great potential for human geographers and social scientists engaged in attempts to understand and represent complex human and social environments through space and over time. This potential can be realised if we, as cartographers, approach cartographic multimedia as a substantive method, with a conceptual and theoretical foundation, rather than as a technology in search of applications. In this chapter I suggest that the idea of praxis — an explicitly theorised practice — should underpin our approach to and understanding of multimedia cartography.

Jake Barton’s Performance Maps: An Essay

Jake Barton, a New York-based designer, creates public maps that generate social interaction, personal expression, and collaborative storytelling. Barton’s work is centered on performance, drawing attention to the performative capacity of maps, a seldom-explored facet of cartographic design and theory. Examples of Barton’s projects, realized and unrealized, are detailed, with a focus on the manner in which maps are designed to evoke performance.

Geographic Information Literacy and the World Wide Web

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses World Wide Web (WWW) that has profoundly transformed the ways to use and create maps. The explosive growth of WWW mapping sites and their popularity suggest that the map education is more important than ever. The chapter also explores the issue of map education in a world transformed by the WWW. As a focus, it documents the ways in which a typical introductory course in “Map Reading” was transformed into a course with extensive exercises in map use and mapmaking by incorporating WWW mapping sites. This course engages students not only in active learning about mapping, but also in critical thinking about the nature of maps and mapping sites on the WWW, a skill that is more necessary than ever. Potential long-term benefits include both map literacy and a more sophisticated understanding of the human and physical environment. The course is influenced by recent initiatives on “Information literacy,” and course resources and exercises have been developed in collaboration with an Information Literacy specialist. As the mapping of WWW sites proliferate, map education, map literacy, and geographic information literacy becomes increasingly vital skills.

Project Ketch: Project Plowshare in Pennsylvania

to its unsuspecting readership that an underground nuclear blast was being studied for a central Pennsylvania location. The announcement, based on secret information uncovered by a Pittsburgh Press reporter, initiated a direct relation between the spectacular and the spatially and socially ‘marginal’. Pennsylvania State University nuclear engineer Nunzio Palladino recalls his initial reaction to the news: ‘My God, right here in Pennsylvania.’ The newspaper article pithily noted that ‘the site . . . must be rather remote’. The spectacular here was the Atomic Energy Commission’s Project Plowshare, an applied exercise in large-scale landscape and subsurface manipulation by means of nuclear explosives, part of the search for ‘peaceful’ uses of atomic energy. The ideas behind Plowshare were ‘engineers’ dreams’, speculative discourses about nuclear modifications of the physical environment at a planetary scale. They drew upon a long cultural history of engineering reverie. As with previous engineers’ dreams, Plowshare was carefully constructed as a spectacle – a means of realizing the project and its entangled practical and political goals. Conversely, the marginal was a landscape in north central Pennsylvania where the blast was to take place (Figure 1), and this too, in terms of both landscape and people, was also carefully constructed. In this case, it needed to be an empty landscape with few people, engaged in minimal economic activity, cast as a negative space, a forgotten periphery to some disinterested core, a hole in the map. In the case of Plowshare and its application in Project Ketch, as the Pennsylvania plan was called, the elaborately constructed spectacular and the systematically produced marginal were brought together by necessity. The strategy behind Ketch was shaped and implemented by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) together with the Columbia Gas Corporation, the latter interested in storing natural gas in chambers created by thousands of underground nuclear blasts in the north-eastern United States. Plowshare concepts, worked out in the private spaces of AEC laboratories in California and nuclear test sites in Nevada, needed to be transferred to and demonstrated in a public

Reflections on J.B. Harley's “Deconstructing the Map”

When asked to reflect on Brian Harley’s ‘‘Deconstructing the Map’’ (Harley 1989) for this special issue of Cartographica, I sat down on the sofa in my office and tried to recall my initial reading of and reaction to the article. What came to mind was less about articles, critiques, theories, or intellectual arguments and more about Harley the person, David Woodward and assorted graduate students, and the Cartographic Lab and History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. But there was also an intellectual impact on work I have done since those long-ago days. Not one I really want to write a typical academic article about, but more on that in a moment.

“Scrappy” Sustainability at Ohio Wesleyan University

Abstract This chapter describes a grassroots, distributed approach to sustainability on a college campus: students, staff, and faculty figure out how to make sustainability happen with no full-time staff and limited funds. There are some benefits to this approach to sustainability: it requires substantive collaboration between students, staff, and faculty. Creative and viable solutions arise from the cooperation of a diverse set of minds, all of whom can contribute some specific kind of expertise to the effort. This approach lends itself to more integration of sustainability across campus, and more active engagement, without depending on (or deferring to) one individual (a sustainability coordinator) for guidance and leadership. The engagement of an increasing number of students provides many excellent theory-into-practice experiences. Success after facing many challenges, but moving forward anyway, may be more meaningful given the persistence it requires. This persistence and creative engagement reveals dedication and commitment to environmental causes. Finally, this approach has put in place a strong foundation of sustainability upon which a sustainability coordinator can build.