November 15-21, 2009 is the 22nd annual Geography Awareness Week (GAW) and ISciences has been asked to guest blog for the GAW blog-a-thon led by National Geographic on Friday. The theme this year is “Get Lost in Mapping: Find Your Place in the World” and Jonathan Boright will be talking about anthropogenic biomes and how they help us to better understand the impact we have on our world.
Prior to our blog-a-thon feature, we wanted to give you some background on the state of American geography awareness back in 1987, when GAW was first established. GAW was established by a Joint Resolution of Congress in response to the lack of geographical knowledge of most Americans at that time. From the 1987 Joint Resolution:
• 20 percent of American elementary school students asked to locate the United States on a world map placed it in Brazil.
• 95 percent of American college freshmen tested could not locate Vietnam on a world map.
• 75 percent of Americans responding to a nationwide survey could not locate El Salvador on a map. [1]
We would like to think that things have improved since then, particularly with the advent of user-friendly, free applications such as MapQuest, Google Earth, and the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap. And we’re not the only ones to have noticed this: two of the guest blog posts for the GAW blog-a-thon on Monday (one by Joseph Kerski and another by Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano) discussed the unique ways that free applications are being used to enhance geography awareness. We believe this is a sure sign that geography literacy is on the uptick and that the statistics of 1987 will soon become but a distant memory.
We’re thrilled to be helping to enhance geography awareness this week and hope you look forward to seeing our feature on Friday.
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