Cultural Geography Blog

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... :)