Geo-Learning“Scaling Up Classroom Maps” Daniel C. EdelsonVice President, National Geographic Education Read Danny Edelson’s latest column in the Spring 2011 edition of ESRI’s ArcNews. An excerpt appears below. Usually, when you talk about the scale of a map, you’re talking about the ratio of distances on the map to distances in the real world. These days, however, when educators working with National Geographic maps talk … Continue reading Danny Edelson: Scaling Up Classroom Maps
Tricorders–The Next Tool for Geographic Learning? “Geo Learning” by Daniel C. Edelson Vice President for Education National Geographic Society
If you’re of a certain age, you probably find yourself looking around and remarking on how much today’s world looks like the world that Gene Roddenberry imagined in the original Star Trek series. OK, we don’t have transporters or warp drives. But we do have computers you can talk to, two-way video communications, and devices that work like communicators and tricorders.
There is a lot of discussion these days about what impact these Star Trek technologies might have on education. In just the last couple months, I attended a one-day summit on the promise of wireless technologies for education and a two-day workshop on the use of mobile devices for citizen science.
For geoliteracy, I think these devices offer amazing opportunities to move learning outside the school building, and we’ve been designing software at National Geographic that students will be able to take into the world on handhelds that will enable them to record observations, combine them with observations of others, and analyze them for geospatial patterns. However, an inescapable challenge of learning in the real world is that the real world is complex and unpredictable. Sometimes it is too complex and unpredictable to enable you to be sure that you can teach specific relationships or skills through real-world experiences.
In his recent ArcNews column, “Get Involved with Geo-Education Reform,” National Geographic Vice President for Education Danny Edelson stressed the need for those of us employed in professions that utilize geographic knowledge and skills to get the word out to friends, family, and others in our networks about what we DO and WHY it’s important. His call to action is duly noted. While I do … Continue reading Sarah Jane On Blogging
In his inaugural column in the spring edition of ESRI’s ArcNews publication, vice president for National Geographic Education Danny Edelson called on GIS professionals to lead the charge in an ambitious campaign for geographic education reform, specifying the goal of achieving 80% geo-literacy among 18-year-olds in the U.S. by 2020. In the second, summer installment of “Geo Learning,” Edelson provides further details on what he … Continue reading Get Involved with Geo-Education Reform
