Originally posted by unknown on January 30, 2016
I came across Google’s Map Your World Community program a few months ago while doing research for an ETEC 521 assignment. This site lets the user create personalized map overlays using Google Maps. I believe these maps can be made public, kept private, or shared with specific people (Much like a Google doc). While this program can be used on a desktop computer, a GPS enabled mobile phone would be needed to map places not available in Google Streetview. This article from the Globe and Mail details how Google’s Map Your World Community program can be used in indigenous contexts. The Globe and Mail article explains how Ray Harris, a Stz’uminus First Nation elder, and an anthropologist from the University of Victoria used Google Maps to map traditional territory. The map they created includes a plethora of indigenous knowledge that would not appear on a regular Google Map, such as the location of a sea wolf petroglyph, the site of a no-longer-standing residential school, and a seagull egg harvesting site. This has potential for indigenous education. Specifically, Harris discusses the potential to share this information in the Hul’qumi’num language. The article also discusses the potential of using this for program for land claims purposes. There are, however, issues with broadcasting traditional information. But these maps can be made private or shared only with certain people.
“I have been fishing all my life, I’ve never recorded anything, I know the whole coast. And I have a hankering now to record stuff, for my kids and my grandkids.
– Ray Harris, Stz’uminus elder
I really like this idea, because it shows the potential for mobile education as a democratising force. Knowledge is no longer constrained and handed down through institutional channels, but can be developed and shared by (and between) various communities across the globe. It also makes me think about how mobile education is foundationally innovative, and that an individual can take any medium, platform, or app, and MacGyver it to have an educational angle. Whilst mobile tools made specifically for education is nice, there is so much good that comes from open source platforms that let people interpret and use technology and networks in the way that they want to. A much less perscriptive education, and I think one that has a lot going for it because of that!
Original comment by unknown on 30 January 2016
I appreciate how Daniel considered an array of educational uses for Google Maps. This app provides users with a means to understand more deeply how we understand ourselves in relationship to land, and how we move across and occupy these spaces. This has significant educational implications as to how students learn about the way space has been organized along political, economic, and social patterns. In my own teaching practice, I use Google Maps as a tool for my students to become aware as to how power and privilege spatially organize the city. They create maps that examine how one’s mobility, class, gender, and/or race influence one’s participation within urban spaces