Cultural Geography Blog

See you in 2014.... have a great Christmas and New Year holiday...

That's a key question posed by the Pole of Cold team who are currently heading for Oymyakon , the coldest inhabited place in the world, to explore how communities cope with extreme cold. I've been thinking about this in the last few days, as we move towards Christmas which (when I was a lad) would guarantee freezing temperatures and plentiful snow.... What's the coldest you've ever been, and where were you at the time ? Please tweet me a reply to  @GeoBlogs , or add a blog comment below. Thanks to those folks who have already replied in the few minutes since I tweeted the original question... All replies will be much appreciated, and I will make use of them in some resources I am currently preparing... after all, I can't do nothing just because I'm on holiday.... While we're on the subject of winter, have some free Mission:Explore missions which are all primed and ready should we get a white Christmas, which is looking quite unlikely judging by th...

This week, one of my favourite bands: Led Zeppelin finally had their albums added to Spotify. This is a service I use for many hours every day... and also when travelling. There's a connection between this particular album and my current job. The front cover of Houses of the Holy was designed by Aubrey Powell: a former pupil of King's Ely, where I now teach. He came to pay a visit earlier in the term... Rock on ! And of course there's a geographical connection with the landscape depicted on the album cover....

The Footing is a new collection of poetry on the theme of walking, featuring a contribution by my friend Rob Hindle. Details below: City, country and coast (and the spaces in between) are the settings for these journeys; here, the act of walking is, by turns, exploratory, destructive, restorative, defiant, contemplative and devotional. The poems and sequences in The Footing are The Strait (Angelina Ayers), Tithes (James Caruth), From a St Juliot to Beyond a Beeny (Mark Goodwin), Flights and Traverses (Rob Hindle), Three Night Walks (Andrew Hirst), Death and the Gallant (Chris Jones) and Breach (Fay Musselwhite). The paths taken inThe Footing offer new perspectives on landscape, history and memory; each poem and sequence is marked by the unscreened, the unplanned, the unexpected.  As Rebecca Solnit says in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, ‘every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable…’

Here's some photos from the recent talk that Dan Raven Ellison and his son Seb did at the National Geographic store in London, based on their ROUTE 125 exhibition. The pictures were taken by Jose Farinha. They can be viewed on the store's FACEBOOK page.

Now available to order from the GA shop. My copy's ordered already... Geography Through Enquiry has been written for teachers of geography in secondary schools and is relevant to all those, in England and elsewhere, where enquiry approaches are advocated.  In this new book, Margaret Roberts develops the ideas of  Learning Through Enquiry (2003) and explores many new issues, including: • How can students develop their understanding of geographical concepts and learn to argue geographically? • How can stereotyping be avoided? • What is the role of teachers in planning and implementing enquiry-based units of work? • What needs to be considered when investigating controversial issues? • How can teachers encourage whole-class and small-group discussion? • How can teachers use classroom questioning to promote a critical understanding of geographical data and ideas?

Had to miss this tour, but this CD looks to be rather wonderful....

Here's a book I read last weekend on the way back from Edinburgh. It was written by Ian Hardie , who until recently was working for Rayburn Tours as their tour guide for Iceland and other locations. Ian has a house in Iceland close to the volcano, and was on the scene when it erupted in 2010. He writes about the impact on the community, and provides in-depth detail of the immediate impacts of an eruption on a community in an MEDC. In that sense it would make a really useful basis for a deeper investigation. It's an easy read. The book is A5 format and has 78 pages. If you would like a copy of the book, we have arranged for that to be possible for you. Please send a cheque made payable to Ian Hardie for £6 (which includes postage and packing) to: John Vannet Greycroft 10 Ellieslea Road West Ferry Dundee DD5 1JH Proceeds from the book will go to support the Icelandic Search and Rescue Organisation (ICE-SAR)

The Tivy medal is not awarded every year, and is awarded for outstanding contributions to Geography and education. Previous winners that I could find were: 2008 - Jim Carson 2009 - Erica Caldwell 2010 - Anita Ganeri 2011 - Scottish Association of Geography Teachers At the recent Scottish Association of Geography Teachers' Conference, Mike Robinson - the Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society read out a citation describing the person judged to have been worthy of being presented with the medal this year, and it turns out it was me! It was presented by Professor Iain Stewart, who is the President of the Society. Along with the medal, there was a very nice certificate of honorary fellowship. What was equally important to me was to read and hear the comments of others who were there, who appreciated the work that I've created, and shared over the years....

Right now, supermarkets around the country are filling with Hallowe'en tat.... Here's some we bought earlier. Sorry about the injury to the skeleton but I dropped a can of beans on its head... The Follow the Things website has all gone spooky, and is offering to tell the 'tales from beyond the halloween decorations'.... Get your trick or treat bag now... I'm going to be blogging in November for the Follow the Things blog. Check out the CLASSROOM resources which I spent a lot of the summer creating along with Prof Ian Cook.

Four days a week in term time, I make my way across the Fens , crossing the border between Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. I've seen some amazing sunsets, towering thunderheads and thick fog so far, and there are many frosty mornings to come through the winter ahead... One of the areas I pass: around Southery , is particularly associated with the cultivation of Fenland Celery. Yesterday, on World Food Day , I heard on the radio that this food crop has now gained Protected Geographical Indicator status with the EU. I have blogged about this several times before. We are now in Fenland Celery season, and it's a pity that in several of the supermarkets that I checked they didn't have any in stock... Will try a few shops in Ely tomorrow... This Government page listing the products needs updating too...

I'm unfortunately going to be unable to make this as planned, but if you're around next Thursday, the 17th of October, head over to Neale Wade Academy for the Teachmeet. Now that I'm teaching, I feel qualified to contribute again :) The focus is on risky pedagogies , and I have a session linked to our work on the Mission:Explore books and curriculum making... it does last about 20 minutes though ;) Sign up HERE....

I blogged earlier about the DISTANCE project which I am involved with. This is related to the idea of the 'Internet of Things'. We are currently creating teaching resources related to this theme, and I spent some time yesterday working on them. We are working with our partners which include Intel, ScienceScope, Open University and the Birmingham Climate Laboratory. I'm grateful to Karl Donert for the tipoff to the European Geographer journal. An article in Issue 11 is excellent, and outlines a speech made by Ed Parsons from Google . I've met Ed a few times in the past, and chatted at the GA Conference a few years back. Ed has a really interesting job within Google. The article is on page 29 and 30, and is based on a session given at Leuven. It describes the value of 'ambient information' which we communicate, often without knowing it... I recommend reading the article  if you're teaching about cities and futures. It's based on some conferenc...

Regular readers will know of the importance of this album in my life... Mike would be in any shortlist of 'famous' people I'd like to meet.... The BBC will be showing a Tubular Bells documentary that was filmed some months ago to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the release of the album. It's called … plus Tubular Bells and will be on BBC4 on Fri 11th October at 9pm. It features an in depth interview with Mike at his studio in the Bahamas and also footage of him performing various sections from the album, plus interviews with family, friends, and many others. Lots of great archive too. It will be followed by a concert from the BBC's archive of The Second House performance of Tubular Bells - only seen this on YouTube.... Now is that a constructive or a destructive wave on the cover ?

There are some games which create a global buzz. Grand Theft Auto is one of those games. I was interested to read of the reaction in the Scottish town of Hawick to their place being used as the name for a 'druggie' district of one of the main cities. An interesting story on globalisation and cultural exports here too from the BBC with plenty of other areas for discussion.... How else are places represented in the game ? How important is geography in the game play ?

A few months ago, I worked on a short project for the COSTA FOUNDATION and RAINFOREST ALLIANCE , which involved creating a set of teaching resources around the theme of coffee production and the impact on those who are involved producing it. I'm grateful to those who helped me collect some of the information that made its way into the resource, which went live this week... Check out the interactive map and teaching resources for download here. Milk, no sugar....

Thanks for reading...

Enhancing Fieldwork Learning is an HEA funded project, which explores the way that technology can enhance pedagogy in fieldwork in particular. There is a focus on data collection, and the use of mobile learning. Last year, I went to the 2nd annual Showcase event of the project at Preston Montford Field Studies centre, and until recently I was due to attend the 3rd event at Rhyd Y Creuau I gave a presentation last time on our work with Mission:Explore and the connections with ludic pedagogies... This time I was going to talk about the DISTANCE project that we have been working on. However, instead of making my way to Snowdonia yesterday, I was teaching, and instead of presenting at the FSC Centre today, I was marking Year 7 homework. All part of my transition back to teaching... I've tweeted a few folks who are at the event, and from the sound of it there have been some excellent presentations and fieldwork excursions. I've been following the event hashtag  too:...

Co-written with John Widdowson and available to purchase from the GA Shop now ... Thanks to all concerned...

What do you call yours ?

Over at the Geography Collective HQ , we’ve been making some changes and plotting some quality events.  We are really pleased and excited to announce some of our plans for our residential camp in early 2014.  This will focus on helping geography departments make sense of and subvert the current changes to the National Curriculum and examination system. As well as the central theme, there will also be lots of informal activities, laughter, great food and fun.   We are shaping the programme at the moment, but it will include stuff like: Fitting existing Schemes of Work and resources to the new National Curriculum; Using young people to hack your existing curriculum; What to do about assessment; Using Key Stage 3 to improve GCSE performance. The final programme will be very much shaped by those who attend. The style will be (un)conferency , with plenty of opportunity for informal chatting and sharing.  As a school leader who held the CPD budget, we’re mak...

For many people, this will be a busy year. Those waiting for the final version of the 2014 curriculum document for Geography will be anticipating changes to what they are teaching. The Geography curriculum review has an expert group which advised the DfE. I worked on the GA's own NC working group earlier in the process. Di Swift has now pulled together a range of material from the meetings and the process, and earlier this week, a new blog went live to share their work. There is useful advice on the notion of curriculum making. I was interested in some of the content, particularly Paul Cornish 's useful sheet for planning which place based content to include in a school's planning and teaching. It will be interesting to see how this site develops, and how people respond to it. Add a comment, and a contribution, and I hope this proves to be helpful.

Just fired up my old Chumby for the first time in a few years and discovered that the feeds had closed down... I bought it when it first arrived in the UK and it's a pity to see that it now has limited functionality. I hope that a solution can be found. The Chumby feeds off the WiFi and generates a range of feeds and widgets which can be customised. I used to have mine working to show Facebook feeds, clocks, news, weather etc. I had to limit the use because of my limited data connection. Ironically that wouldn't be a problem with the increased bandwidth which most home users now have, but this would increase the data that needed to be sent to the devices, hence the cost of maintaining the service presumably... I hope the Chumby comes back to life again... Any other Chumby users out there ?

Check out a new project by Paul Turner  for the new school year. This will develop over time to be another useful point of contact for geography teachers looking for inspiration and resources.

There is currently a trail of decorated gorillas in Norwich city centre. These are along the lines of the Gromits in Bristol which my family and I tried to find when passing through last week. The EDP had a competition to win one, and we entered. I didn't win but my wife and I's designs were included in the paper... Mine 'OS'car, was based on two OS maps of the city...

The details of the CPD courses being offered by the GA in the new academic year have been released, and are available for booking now. Visit the website for details of all the courses. I'm delighted to say that I will be leading the following days... at various venues around the country from the middle of November through to June 2014... Hope to see some of you at one of these events...

In 2001 , I created a website called ' Mr. P's Geography Pages' which was hosted on the free TRIPOD service. A few years later, I moved it to web hosts 123Connect and it became 'GeographyPages'. At the time, other than David Rayner's GeoInteractive and David Robinson's site there were very few Geography-specific websites. This was in the days of Netscape Navigator and dial-up modems chirruping away... The site had a few thousand visitors a year, but quickly grew to over a million visitors and well over that in terms of page views. I had to double the bandwidth, and then again and again.... The website still gets hundreds of thousands of visitors a year,  although I 'archived' it in 2008 when I joined the Geographical Association. If anyone is interested, the domain name is for sale.... one slightly shop-soiled URL (Not that I anticipate anyone will be for a moment....) The site will be disappearing shortly, so grab your favourite bi...

A reminder of the Mission:Explore SUMMER CAMP. We're now just over the half way stage... Providing a daily dose of adventure, the Mission:Explore virtual Summer Camp challenges children to explore nature in your local neighbourhood, park or holiday destination. Can you photograph an alien invasion, cross a park without being caught out by a squirrel or travel 100 metres without being seen?  "Using the site is easy" explained Tim, a 9-year-old Mission:Explorer. "There is a map that you can explore to find missions to do. I chose one that I wanted to do, then went outside to do it. Yesterday I went exploring wearing a mask, pretending that I was someone else. Once I'm done, I share a mission report on the website and collect badges". By visiting the site you can sign up for daily outdoor activities, which are e-mailed to you, or browse a wide range of badges that your children can collect. As Dan Raven Ellison says: "Many of ...

Last year, I helped support a planned Atlas of Food, which was being produced by a group of Guerrilla Cartographers. The aim was to create an atlas of food, from a range of contributors. The Geography Collective contributed a special selection of images from the Mission:Explore Food book, with a sample of missions, and this was included in the final book. There are lots of overlaps here with the work I'm doing at the moment with Follow the Things too, as many of the maps tell the cultural story of food, and connections with wider stories... The e-Atlas can now be downloaded as a PDF from the website. This is an excellent resource, and I will be using this with Year 7 students next year....

A couple of weeks after my last sojourn down to Newquay , it was down to Exeter last week, to work with Ian Cook at the University of Exeter on new classroom page(s) for the Follow the  Things website to be launched shortly... The work is described HERE.  Here's a draft layout of one of the pages.... It'll look a little like this.... What is followthethings.com? It’s an online shopping website, if you understand ‘shopping’ to involve betraying the origins of things, like you might ‘shop’ a person to the police. It’s designed to have the look, feel and architecture of familiar online stores. It’s stocked with examples of art work, documentary film, journalism, activism, academic, student and other work revealing the lives of everyday things, i.e. the relations between their producers and consumers hidden by commodity fetishism. It shows how their makers tried to make these relations apparent, visible, tangible in ways that might move their aud...

It was down to the 30 degree heat of London yesterday. I was off to Drapers' Hall in the City, a short distance from the Gherkin, and round the corner from the Bank of England. The venue was rather grand, with the Livery Hall having been used for filming scenes in 'The King's Speech', for example. After five years of working for the GA and a freelancer, this was my final CPD session before heading back into the classroom. I was asked to talk about authentic learning, and prepared a workshop-style session which ended up being slightly more of a provocation session providing some ideas for bringing case studies to life using outside influences, up-to-date contexts and a sprinkle of technology... There were some familiar faces in the audience. Thanks to Ruth Totterdell, Graham Goldup and Maria Larkin for the invitation. They'd wanted to involve me in Prince's Teaching Institute sessions for a while, but this was the first opportunity. My warm-up man in...

In association with the RSPB... The RSPB Big Wild Sleepout will take place over the summer. Follow the link for ideas to while away the warm summer evenings...

A range of apps have gone free on the App store... Some of them are mentioned on this Mashable post. I heard via Twitter from Clare Rafferty first thing this morning... The Barefoot World Atlas is the first app that I installed - thankfully, I'd had a clear out recently and had the 1Gb+ of space that it takes... This was developed with the assistance of Nicholas Crane and looks rather nice... Get it while you can at 'my favourite price'.... Also check out some of the other free apps too....

A day late perhaps... a belated Happy 4th of July to all my American visitors and readers... :)

Over the next few days, well over 150 000 people will be heading down to Pilton, Somerset for the 2013 Glastonbury Festival. At my new school, I may be teaching a unit on Music Festivals and this is the biggest, and offers a nice context for many geographical themes. The festival becomes a temporary city, most of which are strangers to it... These are the pictures I took when visiting the festival in 2010 for the first (and possibly last) time to work for Mission:Explore / The Geography Collective for the duration. It was a long and hot five days meeting hundreds of people and spending the early hours of the morning (as the dance stage near my tend pounded away) wandering the extremes of the site taking many pictures and soaking up the unique atmosphere. I have to admit to not being that bothered about this year's line-up: not a fan of the Rolling Stones, and Mumford and Sons bored me when I saw them... I'd rather be at LATITUDE to see KRAFTWERK , and co...

Earlier today posted the ten thousandth picture up on my Flickr page. Check the sets for plenty of themed sets of images. Images available under Creative Commons non-commercial / attribution license.

Nice to listen to while working...

Iceland embodied in musical form... New album is available to stream as of 11.06.13...

Over at my main Living Geography blog...

Thanks to Rachel Bowles for the tipoff to a new site, written by the estimable Stephen Scoffham and Fran Martin . It's called ' Frameworks for Intercultural Learning '. It's being piloted at the moment, so head over there and check it out. Recognising our role as global citizens is an essential part of living in the twenty first century. Global challenges such as climate change, the loss of biodiversity and conflicts between social groups require global solutions.  Schools, universities and other educational institutions have a key role in developing critical and creative thinking about such issues, and intercultural learning is central to this process. However, to find new solutions to global problems we need to promote intercultural dialogue and go beyond the limitations of Western models of development. This site draws on the findings from the ESRC funded  Global Partnerships for Mutual Learning  research in two different ways: By directly ...

60 years on...

The new Australian Curriculum document for Geography was launched in the last few weeks. The support site for the introduction of the new curriculum has now gone live too. It's called GEOG SPACE. There's quite an influence from some familiar UK names here, such as this diagram on the 'Child as Geographer' from the work of Simon Catling. © 2013 Education Services Australia Ltd, except where indicated otherwise. You may copy, distribute and adapt this material free of charge for non-commercial educational purposes, provided you retain all copyright notices and acknowledgements. There are also influences in the SUPPORT UNITS from a range of UK geographers including Fran Martin, Paula Owens, Stephen Scoffham and Liz Taylor. The SU PPORT UNIT section , in fact, would make excellent reading for geographers around the globe. It's a really useful synthesis of key thinking around concepts, fieldwork, geographical enquiry, ICT and related areas of geogr...