The Map Room

On paper, the idea of National Geographic’s Giant Traveling Maps seems almost ludicrous. These are truly giant maps — 26 feet by 33 to 35 feet (8m by 10-10.7 m) — that ship folded and rolled in tubes 10 to 12 feet (3-3.7 m) long that weigh around 145 pounds (66 kg). There are maps of North America, South America, Africa and Asia, with the Pacific Ocean coming later in 2011, but you can’t buy one. There are only 10 maps in existence. You can, however, rent one: National Geographic loans them out to schools and other facilities. They won’t fit in a classroom, but have to be unfolded and unrolled in a gymnasium or something similarly large. The maps are made of vinyl: they’re meant to be walked on, but wearing socks, not shoes. It costs schools $480 to rent one for two weeks; for others it costs $700. Because what could be better than a ginormous map, than a portable ginormous map that you can have delivered?

More information on borrowing a map; there’s also a FAQ. Wandering Educators has an interview with the program’s director, Dan Beaupré. A brief item in the Times Union. Via @geoparadigm: 1, 2.

(I have no idea why I didn’t follow up on the Contours blog post about it from October 2008. I mean I flagged it in my RSS reader … )

Inspired by Paul Butler’s Facebook visualization, Olivier Beauchesne has constructed something similar based on a database of scientific collaboration: “From this data, I extracted and aggregated scientific collaboration between cities all over the world. For example, if a UCLA researcher published a paper with a colleague at the University of Tokyo, this would create an instance of collaboration between Los Angeles and Tokyo.” The result is this map of scientific collaboration between researchers. See also FlowingData. Via @spatialanalysis and @geoplace.

“Americans are better educated now than ever, but the distribution of people with college degrees is growing increasingly unequal,” write Roberto Gallardo and Bill Bishop in the Daily Yonder. “And the clustering of people with higher education is creating greater disparities in regional incomes and unemployment.” Their article includes three U.S. county maps showing how much above or below the national average each county has been in terms of number of adults with a college degree since 1990. Via David Brin.

According to this interactive map from the Center for American Progress, “almost one-third of American schools are rural, and more than 40 percent of those students are living in poverty” — which is to say that the challenges involved in educating kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are not inherently urban. Via Will Shetterly.

The Ordnance Survey Blog announces the OS’s Digimap for Schools service, which is set to replace the OS’s Free Maps for 11 Year Olds program (previously), which is closing down after this year. Maps are a mandatory part of the curriculum in England and Wales; I can’t help but wonder whether going digital is necessarily a good idea. (How much of the education system is computer-based nowadays?)

The Globe and Mail reports on the Ontario Schools Map-Making Competition, in which students aged 12 to 18 submit digital or hand-drawn maps in several competition categories. The competition lost its university affiliation this year but was able to continue…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Catholicgauze has an interview with Harm de Blij, who opines on the state of geography, geography education, and geopolitics. De Blij’s most recent book, The Power of Place (see previous entry), is on my to-read pile….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The New York Times’ Economix blog looks at SAT scores and the percentage of high school graduates who take the SAT by state, and finds that while few students take the SAT in the Midwestern states, those who do…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A report by the Center for American Progress and the U.S. Chamber of Congress ranks states on the performance of their schools in eight categories of “innovation”; naturally, these grades have been put on an interactive map. Via Cartophilia….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Okay, how does something like this happen? “A map of South America in which landlocked Paraguay is shown with an Atlantic coastline and Ecuador does not exist may be found in a [sixth-grade] geography textbook used in the public schools…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Age has a brief piece on the geospatial science program at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology — “apparently the only dedicated cartography degree in Victoria and one of only two in Australia.”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Briefly noted: GeoWeb Guru has a review of Geography Mark-Up Language: Foundation for the Geo-Web by Ron Lake et al. (via Slashgeo); Google Earth Blog reviews Josie Wernecke’s KML Handbook (previously); Vector One reports on the first A-level GIS…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tools for Adventure is a travelling exhibition about maps, targeted at children from grades three through five, produced by the National Geographic Society and the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. It’s currently at Baylor’s Mayborn Museum Complex (in Waco, Texas) through…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Andy Anderson wrote to point to an older (2006) item from Education Week that is nonetheless worth a look: Mapping Out High School Graduation. From the article: “The EPE Research Center mapped 2002-03 graduation rates for public school districts…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Excerpts from TMW Media Group’s Geography Tutor video series have been posted to YouTube; map-related clips include the above video on map projections, this clip on the International Date Line and this clip on the use of colour in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

John Krygier points to the “Longitude and Latitude” song. Performed by Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans, the song comes from Space Songs, one of several science-education albums recorded in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Six of those albums can…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The West Texas Geological Society is running a project to put a large geologic map of the United States into every elementary school in Midland and Odessa, Texas — a project apparently based on another in Corpus Christi. Via All…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Springfield Republican reports on a GIS project conducted by students of Turners Falls High School, which is part of ESRI’s U.S. Community Atlas program. The students produced a number of maps of the towns of Gill, Montague and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you have four days in July and £500, there’s a course called A History of Maps and Map-making being offered by the University of London’s Institute of English Studies as part of the new London Rare Books School, which…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is a real find: the U.S. Army field manual for map reading and navigation, including those things related to maps that the Army felt a soldier should know. (Which, according to chapter one, seems to be quite a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jason Kottke is fascinated by memory maps — that is to say, maps drawn entirely from memory. In addition to some sites we’ve seen here before (previous entries below), he presents a couple more for our enjoyment. First, the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Smithsonian’s Earth from Space is an online exhibition of satellite imagery; images include climate, geology and human activity. It’s also a physical exhibition, on a tour that began last month and continues until January 2010. Lesson plans are…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Library of Congress Geography and Map Division’s Zoom Into Maps site isn’t just an educational tool and teaching resource, it’s a portal into, guide to and sample of the division’s very large map collection. Via Very Spatial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google for Educators, a web site about using Google’s stuff in the classroom, includes a section on using Google Earth in teaching, including some lesson plans. Via Ogle Earth. There’s also a page on using Google Maps in the classroom,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Learning at the British Library has a section on maps — not a comprehensive archive, but a selection that illustrates key themes for educative purposes using examples from the Library’s collection. Four sections: ideas, lies and deception, war, and wealth…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Le petit blog cartographique points to an archive of maps from Le Dessous des cartes, a shortly weekly program broadcast on the German-French arts and education network, Arte. The maps are from episodes from 1998 to 2001….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartography points to the Ordnance Survey’s Free Maps for 11 Year Olds program, which, according to a recent news release, has doubled the number of students who feel confident using maps and tripled the number who enjoy using them. The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ben Keene, the editor of Oxford University Press’s atlas program (see previous entry), looks at the changes in geography he had to deal with in 2005 (via World Hum). MapQuest has inadvertently left Edmonton off a map of Canadian cities…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’re reading this, you probably like maps, and quite likely can read them without much effort. So it might be easy to forget that map literacy isn’t necessarily a given, but it is important. Why Some Students Have Trouble…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Schoolchildren in Liverpool, as part of a safety project called “Our Walk to School,” have mapped their local areas in an attempt to highlight road and traffic hazards; the maps, on A4 paper, have been collected in an atlas which,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

American Ethnic Geography: the web site for a second-year geography course at Valparaiso University has an excellent collection of map galleries; the maps — mostly GIFs, some PDFs — provide a wealth of interesting information on North American demographics: ethnicity,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This ten-minute animated presentation depicts the growth and territorial development of the U.S. since 1789; with audio. It’s one of several similar products from Animated Atlas aimed at classroom use; the others, though, cost money. Via Kottke….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Royal Canadian Geographic Society, which publishes Canadian Geographic, launched the Canadian Geographic Atlas Online yesterday. It garnered lots of media coverage. Too bad it sucks. To begin with, there isn’t much in the way of maps: it’s more a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ending January 15, a public exhibit by the Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library at the University of Texas at Arlington, Mapmaker’s Vision, Beholder’s Eyes: The Art of Maps. “The exhibit explores the elaborate artistry of cartography and seeks to answer…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A private school in Texas is using maps in its curriculum as a means of combining art, history and science instruction, the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram reports….  •  Continue reading this entry.