Education – Page 3 – The Map Room

Ordnance Survey Announces National Map Reading Week

Published on 22 September 201622 September 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The Ordnance Survey is launching a National Map Reading Week, to be held 17-23 October 2016, aimed at improving people’s map-reading skills. The OS cites evidence that a surprising number of people in the U.K. do poorly at maps and geography:

People were asked to plot various locations, from cities to National Parks on an outline map of Britain and we were pretty surprised at the results. Some 40% of people struggled to pinpoint London and only 14% could accurately plot Edinburgh’s location. […]

Even more worrying to us, just 40% of those surveyed felt they could confidently read a map with 10% never having used a paper map.

Now, map literacy and geographical knowledge aren’t the same thing: you can know how to read a map without being any good at placing something on a blank map (at least in theory). Either way, the Ordnance Survey will be producing guides and hosting workshops during the week in question. (In the meantime, they point to these map reading guides.)

As a major publisher of maps, it’s in their interest to do this sort of thing—a map-reading public is a map-buying public, after all—but increasing map literacy is an unquestionably good thing.

Map Men

Published on 29 August 201627 September 2022 by Jonathan Crowe

Map Men is a YouTube series by comedians Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones. It’s funny as hell, and quite informative too: it’s two silly people being very smart about often-silly cartographical situations. Six episodes so far; I hope they make more. [Geographical]

Why Children Still Need to Read Maps

Published on 3 February 20163 February 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

“While many skills have become obsolete in the digital age, map reading remains an important tool for building children’s spatial reasoning skills and helping them make sense of our world,” writes Deborah Farmer Kris on the PBS Parents website. [via]

How to Cite GIS Materials

Published on 25 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

“How to Cite GIS Materials” is an older post (Caitlin Dempsey Morais first posted it to GIS Lounge in 2012, but retweeted it recently) but all the same a perennially useful one: it demonstrates proper citation format for GIS data sources as well as maps, whether paper or online.

The New York Times’ Learning Network and Maps

Published on 18 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

I was not aware of The Learning Network, a New York Times blog that provides online teaching resources for teachers, students and parents based on the newspaper’s content. Some of the posts deal with learning to use the Times’ maps and infographics; the most recent is on how to analyze maps to understand current events. [via]

19th-Century Children’s Maps

Published on 1 April 201219 October 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

“In the 18th and 19th centuries, children were taught geography by making their own maps, usually copies of maps available to them in books and atlases at their schools or homes,” says a David Rumsey Collection post from January 2010 that is for some reason drawing attention right now. “These old maps made by children were hand drawn and colored, one-of-a-kind productions, and it is amazing that any have survived down to our time. That they have is due to luck and the efforts of families to preserve the history of their children.” Anyone interested in hand-drawn maps will like these; for my part I can’t get over the similarity in style between these maps and later fantasy maps. Via io9 and MetaFilter.