Feedback, and grade, on the work thus far

I have identified you by randomly generated ID numbers. I will individually email you your respective ID #s; however, if the email problem continues, it might be a while before you get that info :-(

Click here for the comments on your work, and the letter grade.

The bottom line is that you need to pay attention to the question; in this case, the map work requirements asked for details on Sub-Saharan Africa, and not on Nigeria. Many of you provided lots of details on Nigeria though ....

Have a fantastic Fourth of July cookout and, if you are like me, well, I bet you too are thankful that you live in the paradise that the Willamette Valley is--except for the four weeks of grass seed pollen!!!

Email problems?

Hi Jacob, (and anybody else with the same problem?):

I sent you two emails .... I wonder why they never reached you. The bottom line is this: the answer to your question is "yes"

The rest ..... if you don't receive a reply from me, within a maximum of three days, the possibilities are:
1. the WOU email system is screwed up;
2. if you are using a non-WOU address, then that is screwed up;
3. the instructor is in the ICU, in which case you all end up with an "A" :-)

In any case, you might then email the class to find out, which is what Jacob wisely did.

Earlier I sent you an email through the class list. This email is coming to you from the blog.
Will at least one of you provide me with feedback on whether you received two emails, or only one. Thanks

Sub-Saharan Africa: map work 1

I have never been to Sub-Saharan Africa. Well, I haven’t been to Africa! Which is why I am excitedly (and a tad anxiously) looking forward to my trip to Tanzania later in December. I will be there for a month. I am confident that I will come back much more informed and wiser about Tanzania, and Africa too.

Of course, throughout graduate schooling, and even here at Western, I have had the pleasure of interacting with Africans. A good friend in graduate school was from Nigeria. He now lives in Minnesota—totally unlike Nigeria, as one might imagine. A couple of months ago, when I emailed him about the cold there, he wrote back that his son, who was born in Minnesota, was complaining that it was way too warm to play outside; and apparently it was only 30 degrees outside!

Nigeria is one huge country, with a diversity that we “outsiders” often don’t pause to recognize, let alone understand. As noted in the CIA Factbook:

Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, is composed of more than 250 ethnic groups; the following are the most populous and politically influential: Hausa and Fulani 29%, Yoruba 21%, Igbo (Ibo) 18%, Ijaw 10%, Kanuri 4%, Ibibio 3.5%, Tiv 2.5%

To begin with, most African countries are creations of the European colonizers; i.e., the countries did not always exist as we currently know them. In fact, often the borders were drawn so horribly that clans ended up divided into two different countries. (Note: do not make the mistake of referring to Africa as a country; it is a continent, with a number of countries that have linguistic, cultural, ethnic, religious, and other differences. And, "Niger" is different from "Nigeria.")

Nigeria is oil-rich. For those of you familiar with the idea of one single land mass a long, long time ago, and then the land masses breaking up and drifting apart, well, you will find it exciting to note that when you fit Africa and South America, their oil rich areas neatly overlap. Venezuela is rich in oil, and so is Nigeria.

Oil, it turns out, is a curse—most countries that are oil-rich have huge internal problems. Nigeria too has lots of problems, with oil itself, and otherwise too. One of the problems is what you read about. Demographically, Muslims and Christians are nearly equal in numbers, which I would guess makes Nigeria pretty unique among the countries of the world.

Of course, Nigeria is only one of the countries in a large geographic region that we refer to as Sub-Saharan Africa. You notice where Tanzania is in this region, and its location relative to Nigeria? A friendly note here: if you do meet somebody from Africa, say Senegal, make sure you don’t ask them for details about, say, Uganda. It will be like expecting an Italian to be able to explain Estonia. (Yes, Estonia is a real country.)

An interesting factoid: notice Ghana quite near Nigeria? A little off the coast of Ghana is the triple-zero of location on this planet: zero degree latitude, zero degree longitude, and zero degree altitude. So, if you want to determine the center of the planet based on latitudes and longitudes, well, now you know :-)

Sub-Saharan Africa has an incredible amount of natural resources—which is why European colonizers went there in the first place. Yet, it is one of the poorest regions of the world. And seemingly trapped in a great deal of political instability. In the center of this region is the Democratic Republic of Congo, with immense problems and conflicts. Congo, the river, is one of the largest rivers in the world—in terms of water volumes. This part is also home to the rainforests. If you have taken Jordan Hofer’s class, well, you are probably familiar with this territory.

The news earlier today was about the crash of a Yemeni plane near the Comoros Islands. These are very near Tanzania, almost midway between the coast of Tanzania and the island of Madagascar (which, I presume, you are familiar from the movie?)

Just because we are looking at south of the Sahara, it does not mean that everything is lush green. Do not forget the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. (Note that the usage “southern Africa” does not refer to the country of “South Africa.”) Up until very recently, a colleague, Gwenda Rice, used to lead a team of school teachers to the “bush country” in Botswana. I am not sure if she does that anymore. Chat with Dr. Rice about this if you know her.

Another long lecture, eh! Any questions, comments, thoughts?

In the next couple of days I will email you individual feedback on this and the previous assignment

About your intro-assignment

Hey, a few comments on your intro-task essays.

First the negatives, and then the positives, and then my comments on how this assignment adds to your knowledge base.

1. A few of you focused only on reflecting on the test results. I.e., you took the test, kept track of what you missed, and then spent time thinking about why you might have missed those questions. However, you have completely skipped the second part of the same assignment, which was to link these reflections to the two essays—one by Wade, and the other by Murphy. Pay attention to the question.
   I tell students in my regular classes that assignments have two purposes: first and foremost is to make sure that students have opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge. Second, it is a preparation for the “real world” where things have to be done in a timely manner, and in required formats. When you omit a part of the question, then you have denied yourself a wonderful opportunity to let the “supervisor” know that you really have done your job.
2. Pay attention to the mechanics of writing. Yes, this is not a writing-intensive course. But, again, think of this as a preparation for the world outside, which is, “nasty, brutish, and short” to quote Hobbes (not the cartoon character!) You will quickly lose credibility, particularly if you are planning to be a teacher, if you exhibit one too many errors.

The positives:

1. It looks like most of you honestly reported your test results, even when it showed that you did not do well. For a faculty like me who gives take-home exams in my regular class, well, I rely on an honors system. Thus far, both in my regular classes and in my online classes I have had no evidence of foul-play, which then strengthens my confidence in my students.
2. It appears that many of you have had no geography classes since middle school. Why is that a positive? Well, that means that we will add quite a bit of value to your knowledge base by the time this term ends. After all, isn’t that a goal of education—to add value?

My comments on the assignment:

It is interesting, even to me, that I teach this course and a few other courses like this. Because, as some of you know really well from my intro in my regular classes, I have no degree in geography. None what so ever.

Yet, I am a neo-traditionalist geographer, as I describe myself. The courses I teach are “traditional” and are not usually the favored approaches—which is what Wade and Murphy write about. Wade and Murphy emphasize the immense value these traditional regional geography courses provide, and I agree with them. Hence, one of your comments, such as this one, does not surprise me at all:

I realized that not much emphasis has been put on teaching regional geography material/courses at the schools which I have attended

However, I do not teach them in the “traditional” modes. For instance, Murphy has co-authored a regional geography textbook with Harm de Blij—the same person whose videos I have included for you. But, I don’t use that text, or any other for that matter, because they are old-school. I would rather experiment, particularly with the phenomenal wealth of information, articles, and even books, that are available for free on the web, and introduce students to regional geography in a route that is more in-sync with contemporary ways of conversations and understanding the world.

Are you still with me? Just checking :-)

One student wrote in the assignment,

It was obvious to me where most of my knowledge about the world comes from. Let’s just say that the easiest question for me to answer was about the television show, CSI.

I totally get this. Which is also why in most of my classes I use videos from the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and the Onion. Because, I think I can facilitate the understanding of the topics using those vehicles—which, by the way, are available free of cost on the web!

Many of you had written about how you had no idea about the devastating earthquake that happened in Pakistan. To me, this again is a fantastic piece of evidence on how the American media and politicians are insanely America-centric. Such an approach worked well up until the end of the twentieth century, but will not work in this century—the problems we face are intensely global. Everything from the current recession to climate change to even the products we purchase has a global dimension that we simply cannot afford to ignore. Again, you are now a few steps ahead of most students who have not had courses about the rest of the world. As one student wrote:

I hope that geography becomes a more important topic because it is important to know about what is going on in the world in order to survive.

I hope so, too.

Don’t think of this as a long email: instead, view this as my “lecture” and this is the point in my lecture when I would ask students for comments/questions. So, email (preferably to the entire class) if you have any thoughts/comments on my points here.

Syllabus set, and more

Hey, I want to make sure you have checked the syllabus and noticed that it is complete.

Online teaching and learning brings out one important aspect of education: while in the "regular" classes we require students to be physically present at identified times, there is in reality very little anybody can do to mandate "mental" presence. And, to make sure that students have indeed done the assigned readings. In the online environment, well, the fact that I won't be staring at you in a classroom might tempt you that much more to skip the readings. Online teaching is aptly referred to as "teaching with your mouth shut"

Anyway, DO the readings, watch the videos, and feel free to ask questions. Keep in mind that the focus of this course is to develop a geographic understanding of the world, which we try to do by slicing the world into regions.

Finally, given the six week session, I had to pick and choose from the regions. I intentionally skipped Central and South America because we do offer quite a few courses related to those areas--not only in geography, but also in history, sociology, ....

However, if you are interested, here is something to think about: (and, yes, I would always be interested in your responses, too)

It has been nearly twenty years since former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle was quoted – perhaps maliciously – as saying that the realm is named Latin America because everyone there speaks Latin, but in fact the origin of this appellation is not as obvious as it may appear. The ultimate Latin roots of both Spanish and Portuguese may constitute common ground, but neither Spanish nor Portuguese settlers arrived in the Americas calling themselves Latinos. The suggestion has been made that the concept of Latin America was externally imposed by Western influences as an exercise in “coloniality” (Mignolo, 2005). The French emperor Napoleon III is often cited as the first to use Amerique Latine as a goal among his expansionist policies, but that goal proved elusive and the phrase inconsequential. In the United States, the regional reference appears to have come into use during the early twentieth century; until then, “Spanish America” was routine.

That is an excerpt from an op-ed, in the AAG newsletter, by Harm de Blij, who is a distinguished professor of geography at Michigan State. He further writes that in this so-called "Latin America":

The indigenous presence is far stronger. African influences are pervasive and locally dominant. From the Japanese in Brazil to the South Asians in Guyana, from the Dutch in the Antilles to the Lebanese in Chile, this is a culturally plural realm. From the rugby fields in Argentina to the cricket grounds in Barbados, this truly is a New World undeserving of a geographic designation that reflects bygone cultural power and historic dominance, not current and future reality.

I agree with his call for action--to get rid of "Latin America" as a phrase to describe a geographic realm; he concludes thus:

“Latin America” is entrenched as self image in South and Middle America and indeed as external emblem elsewhere. ... geographers are seen as the arbiters of nomenclature. Let us begin a discussion ... Our Hemisphere has three geographic realms: South, Middle, and North. If we need an allusive umbrella to substitute for “Latin” in two of these three realms, and increasingly in the third, might “PanAmerica” be a prospect?

Is it high time we ditched "Latin America?"