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Showing posts from 2015

A Christmas song for you...

Les Penning & Rob Reed "Sussex Carol" by robert reed

The Good Dinosaur

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Out to the cinema last weekend to see the latest Pixar movie: The Good Dinosaur. One thing which hit you straight away from the opening scenes, was the amazing animation of the landscape , and the part that the landscape and in particular the river , and flash flooding has in the story. Details of the way that the film makers researched the landscape and how to portrait can be seen in this  article: From Pixar Post Apparently the USGS were also involved in ensuring the accuracy of the landscape and the way that it was portrayed. I enjoyed the movie. Before the main feature, there was another short film called 'Sanjay's Super Team', which was an excellent comment on cultural globalisation. Next film on the list, booked for over Christmas period is the new 'Star Wars'.... Wyoming is hoping to cash in by making the most of its link with 'The Good Dinosaur', and the Grand Tetons area in particular. More on this to come over on my Geography and

A year in (streamed) music

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Spotify has been allowing users to see the results of their year of streaming, and released the data on usage. My son and daughter use my Spotify too, but not to the same degree as I do. Here are a few of the results of the Year in Music feature... That's a lot of time spent at my iMac writing and listening to music...

150 000 views

Thanks for visiting and reading.

Pico Iyer on the meaning of home

I have a few Pico Iyer books. They are interesting and well-written explorations of movement, and the edges of the world, and the pull of home. I enjoyed this Ted Talk where Pico starts with the simple question: "Where do you come from?"

Free 'Doing Cultural Geography'

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Follow this link for a PDF of ' Doing Cultural Geography ', edited by Pamela Shurmer-Smith.

Fish and Chips

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I've blogged many times before here and elsewhere about the cultural geography of food. This Telegraph article provides some useful background on the history of fish and chips, which many associate with being our national dish. Every village deserves to have a decent chippy, and I'm glad to say that we have one where I live. Image: Alan Parkinson - click for biggery...

Back in time...

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Back in July  1985 , shortly after graduating (which makes me feel old), I went to Doncaster to visit my friend and contemporary Conor (now an award-winning author and Professor of Medieval History) and we went to the nearby cinema to see a movie about a character travelling backwards 30 years in time and then forward 30 years at the very end. His time machine was a de Lorean car, and the date that he travelled to in the future will be reached next week... Back to the Future day is October the 21st. A few teachers on Twitter have been considering what they might do to mark this in lessons. I'm not quite sure what to do yet, and may actually run out of time to plan anything other than wear a gilet.... which isn't too creative. That time is actually the very end of the school day, so I may just play the theme tune as students leave, or perhaps try to hide the flux capacitor into as many PPT slides as possible... or something else completely... Any geography-related id

We British - a poetic Shipping Forecast

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Radio 4 A brief reimagining of the Shipping Forecast Thanks to Paula Owens for the tipoff...

RGS update piece on Changing Place, Changing Places

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The Royal Geographical Society have produced a very useful topic update for the new 'A' level Geography Changing Place, Changing Places topic. It is written by Richard Phillips, Professor of Human Geography from Sheffield University, who was on the ALCAB (the 'A' level Content Advisory Board) and so was probably partly 'responsible' in some ways for the topic ending up on the new specification. It's also a topic that the awarding bodies have struggled to capture in a way that OFQUAL will accept is suitably rigorous. PDF download from the above link

David Matless book on the Norfolk Broads

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Thanks to Sharon Witt for the tipoff to this book, which I have now ordered. It's about the Norfolk Broads, and offers a range of interesting short pieces on the nature of the landscape in that area. Written by David Matless. Scope for using the approach to explore other regions with students... The introduction discusses an injunction by Georges Perec to ‘see more flatly’ (wryly apt considering the landscape being seen), and the pieces do try to look beyond official accounts of place to draw on tiny concrete details, lived experience, historical perspective, technical boating matters, economics, and so on and so forth. Of course, unless you note  everything , the very act of selecting details unflattens them, making (to mix my spatial metaphors horribly) salient features out of what had been background trifles. Similarly, the alphabetical ordering of the pieces is a way of insisting on the ‘non-hierarchical’ approach; I think Matless wouldn’t object if you read them in a r

Star Wars returns...

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I went to see the original back in 1978 in Sheffield...

James Taylor is a geographer...

The track 'Montana' has been on the radio quite a lot the last week or so. It's a lovely track... The lyrics are very geographical in nature too: Who can imagine the scale of the forces That pushed this old mountain range up in the sky? Tectonic creation, erosion, mutation; Somethin' to pleasure God's eye. The world is a wonder of lightnin' and thunder, And green of the ground as we fall from the sky. The old and new faces, the tribes and the races... Thousands of places to try. There's also the track with Mark Knopfler 'Sailing to Philadepelphia' about Mason and Dixon who surveyed earlier America, producing the Mason-Dixon line: the cultural divide between the Northern and Southern United States. Check it out below:

Ascension...

Ascension from Ascension Le Film on Vimeo . An excellent animation...

Teach in London ? We'd like a moment of your time to help us..

700 posts...

A minor milestone Thanks for reading my cultural geography postings: an area that's grown quite a lot since I started the blog...

US States on TV

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Accents...

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Go!

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Alan Garner lecture

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Would love to have gone to this event, and found out about it in plenty of time to get a ticket. Too far and the wrong timing though. A real literary hero of mine.

Conference in Toulouse

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A few days ago, I picked up the news of a conference being organised by Russel Tarr at the International School of Toulouse. I was due to go to the previous event in 2012 that Russel organised, but it clashed with something I was already committed to. This time round, that's not a problem The focus is on pedagogy, and there's a keynote from Ewan McIntosh. Good to see my name in the programme (though that's subject to getting permission to go from school as it's during term time) It's a combination of Mission:Explore and GeoCapabilities.... Looking forward to the possibility of visiting Toulouse. Delighted to announce that @GeoBlogs will deliver a workshop at #PracPed15 ! http://t.co/dFvwgKKMIV pic.twitter.com/0AIUY5DwRk #geographyteacher — Russel Tarr (@russeltarr) February 19, 2015

Earth Primer: now available on the App store...

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A month or so ago, I picked up on an app that was getting ready for adding to the App store. I contacted Chaim Gingold , who worked on the game called SPORE some years ago, and found out more about it, and started to get excited about the potential for teaching the ideas that underpin geomorphology to a lower school audience, and those who may just be interested in finding out more about how the Earth works. The app is now live on the App store at a cost of £7.99 , and is called Earth Primer. Take a look here. It allows the user to explore the world in an exciting way and explore how processes that shape the earth work. There are several sections which are possible to work through and these include a look beneath the surface of the Earth as well as the range of processes which change the surface. Work through the book to unlock tools which can then be used in the Sandbox section of the app. I'm working on some education materials for the app, which will be availabl

Cultural Geographies of Food...

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The Office for National Statistics has released a great variety of visualisations in recent times, and the latest one is well worth a look. I'm interested in the visualisation on how much households spend each week , for example. This is a useful basis for discussions about inequality and changing lifestyles. Coincidentally, there was also this BBC article on the changing contents of the 'basket of goods' that is used to calculate inflation. Lots of cultural geography connections here...

New for 2015

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First cultural purchase of 2015 will be the new Decemberists album ... unless I get something else first...