After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe, cartographers were faced with choices on how the new post-Cold War political landscape would be mapped. One such group called the Pluto Project had been producing atlases since 1981 with a progressive point of view about the nature of state power…

English 302: Writing about the Arts is a practicum course offered at the University of Windsor for upper-level English undergraduate students. The course asks students to write about a variety of art forms and requires engagement with multiple genres of writing as a way for students to effectively order their experiences, reconstruct meaning in…

Children's cognitive skills change substantially from the time they enter school at about the age of five to when they graduate from high school a dozen years later. Some changes can be attributed to the school curriculum, but others are part of children's developmental evolution as they mature and interact with the world. Rather than reviewing…

The computer packages of PLOTALL, SYMAP, SURFACE II, QUSMO, QUSMO2, QUCRS, and QUTAB are commercially available plotting programs that provide aids for visualizing spatial distributed data and concepts. The incremental drum and line printer plots communicate often vast and difficult-to-interpret tabular data with or without geographic coordinates.…

Map making is an exercise in spatial relationships, perspective, and direction, and also can increase students' knowledge of their community and sense of place. In a Roger Tory Peterson Institute program, children map the environment around their school and simultaneously learn science, mathematics, language arts, and social studies. Describes…

A recent article in Security-Focus described the fact that several U.S. government buildings in Washington DC could no longer be clearly seen by people using MapQuest's aerial photo database. In addition, the photos of these buildings were altered at the Web sites wherein they are posted at the request of the U.S. Secret Service. This is an…

Examines children's knowledge and understanding of global spatial relationships. Utilizing cut-outs of continents to estimate their size in relation to Europe, the students consistently underestimated the size of Asia and overestimated Australia. Possible reasons for this are discussed and teaching approaches suggested. (MJP)

Mapping Our City is a two-year project in which middle school teachers and students in Boston explore the uses of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in project-based science, environmental education, and geography. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and is being field tested in three Boston middle school science classrooms.…