Geography Education

USGS National Geologic Database- TopoView

Find out how the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Native Americans celebrated the first Thanksgiving together at Plymouth Plantation.

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and this is a great resource with videos, primary documents, virtual field trips and lesson plans for all grades, K-12.  Students can see aspects of lifestyles, housing types and economic activies of both the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags.  For more resources about the Mayflower and the historically re-enacted village, see the Plimoth Plantation website.  

Tags: K12, seasonal, historical, colonialism, virtual tours.

This is a link from the Rhode Island Geography Education Alliance which is now on Twitter.   UPDATE: This shows the number of power outages in the state. 

There are plenty of regional biases about other places.  This map was generated by Google autocomplete.  If you Google, "Why is Rhode Island so...." if will automatically suggest some responses.  This was done for all the states and these autoresponses are quite revealing (and often humorous). 

Whoa, check out Trulia Local - A visual way to explore crime, schools, home prices, and local data.

 

The map above was generated to display the areas within a 30 minute commute of Rhode Island College in Providence.  This site generates commuting maps and other layers that are especially pertinent for home buyers---schools, crime stats, property values and local amenities.  This is GIS data brought to the real estate shopping community, but consider this a project in the making.  One of the best exercises to get to know a place holistically is to shop for housing and make some locational analysis decisions.

After cutting a destructive path through the Caribbean, Hurricane Sandy caused extensive damage along the East Coast this week.

While the damage wasn't as bad as many feared it could have been, place and spatial context are especially important in assessing the impacts of a natural disaster.  This is a excellent collection of the many devastating images as a result of Hurricane Sandy.  To see some more local images, Rhode Island Department of Transportation put this collection together.   

While touring Kevin Babola's art studio yesterday, I found this thought-provoking piece entitled ‘Political Landscapes.’ I greatly enjoyed my conversation with the artist about the political, economic and urban visions that went into this painting.  The conceptual idea behind this painting started when the artist was exploring the neighborhoods of New Bedford, MA and noticed how a sense of place can change very quickly. I dare say most cities have areas similar to the one portrayed here where the socioeconomic character changes very abruptly. While physically it might be very easy to cross from the side of the street with tenements to the neighborhood with single family homes, making that transition permanent is incredibly difficult.

 

Questions to ponder: what leads to cities having abrupt changes in the urban fabric? What might this chasm represent to people on either side of the divide? How does this impact the neighborhood institutions (schools, local government, etc.)?  Please visit the artist's webpage at: http://www.kbolaillustration.com

RT: As we discussed in class today about businesses basically running cities, CVS has a dominating presense in Woonsocket, where it's corporate headquaters is located. In 2009 closing the exsisting CVS on Cass Ave and erecting a new larger one up the street was proposed, doing so would involve demolishing 7 buildings, and change the comunity forever. An uproar was caused within the community, and the in protest this blog was created. Despite the community disagreement, CVS was able to pass all the zoning laws and problems involved with constrution. This is an example of a corporation using their influence to get what they want.

KV: Development of a high end apartment complex in a low income area would force pre-gentrification people out of the neighborhood. The taxes would get raised to amounts that make it difficult for these people to afford. However, the people in charge of this project are ignoring the consequences and focusing on the 5 million dollars tax break. 

 

SD: This sign went up in to 2006 protest the mills-to-condo developments in Providence, Rhode Island.  Click here to see the photographer's work.