Commodifying Geography

Trying to expand the surfing habits of the kids in my class, trying to give them experiences beyond downloading mp3 files, this week I showed them Google Earth. Of course they were first amazed by the graphics and spent time tracking down our small town and other places they had visited. Then they started expanding. Off the Egypt to see the pyramids, to California to see the Golden Gate Bridge, and cruising the parking lots of downtown Chicago picking out the kinds of cars people drive.

Interesting conversations ensued. Some of these kids have never been outside of Manitoba, our home province, now they had access to images of the globe. I wondered about the context of their knowledge. How could they possibly relate to what they were seeing? They commented on how this made the world smaller and gave them the chance to peek into other cities. But the places these kids need to see the most are the places that are most unlike us. They need into China, Africa, the cities of Asia, and these are the places that Google has not yet mapped down to the level of detail of many North American cities.

Many of these students have told me that after using it at school, they have spent hours surfing the globe after downloading the software at home. Geography has become another commodity for them, something they can access easily, quickly, and with little effort. The images are powerful, they link us together, but I wonder about what they promote. Do they promote any type of understanding of other spaces or places? Do they help these kids learn about the lives of others and promote global connections, or do they just allow them to become global voyeurs? My hope is that a tool like this will make kids curious about others and how they live. It will help them understand the interconnectedness of our world and will help them to become literate in new forms of information; but I wonder.

technorati tags: Google Earth, information, geography

Comments

[DeafScribe]

After the initial astonishment over the graphics and the capabilities of the program - I blew away an entire weekend just learning what it can do - the reality settled in that I now had easy, daily access to the Ultimate Map.

Google Earth is the culmination of the art. Not that it's perfect, but it does represent the most accessible, wide-ranging geography tool ever available to ordinary citizens.

Google Earth is hands-on, interactive, and dynamic, making it compelling enough that I suspect geographic knowledge is going to become second nature for a lot of kids. They're going to play with it and in the course of playing, they're going to absorb a lot they won't get from a static resource such as a book.

I believe it's going to kick geographic literacy up to a whole new level.