Reflecting on Lesson 9 - Maps, Atlases and Geographic Sources...

As a Social Studies teacher I was pleased to have a weekly topic which relates directly to what I currently teach.  I was pleased that the readings taught me several things about these sources which are so relevant to my daily teaching.

I was interested to learn that over ninety percent of maps published are government based sources.  This definitely surprised me as I did not realize that the overwhelming majority of maps were produced by or originated from statistics of governments.  Upon reflection, it does make sense.  Very few individuals go about creating maps.  Those that do, create these maps based on other maps or government statistics.  As a result, just about every map is created based on some kind of government statistics or other information.

I was also very interested by Riedling’s criteria for evaluating geographic sources.  She states that the major criteria are the publisher, scale, currency, indexing and format.  After reading about these criteria I decided to apply them to several atlases in my classroom.  Each atlas clearly met all of Riedling’s criteria as the atlases were very current, well formatted, with an easy to use index and maps which were in scale.  What I was surprised to find was that the publisher of the two atlases was the same.  Out of curiosity I checked the publishers of other atlases within the school and I found that they were all published by one of two companies (Rand McNally and the National Geographic Society).  This finding made me confident that the content of our atlases was authentic.  It also further supported Riedling’s point that most geographic sources come from the same publishers whose information originates from similar governments sources.

The activity within this lesson was also quite fascinating as I compared two online atlases: Atlas of Canada and the CIA’s World Factbook.  In applying Riedling’s evaluative criteria, I noticed that both were published by the federal governments of Canada and United States respectively.  Both had accurate scales on their maps.  However, the scales of the Canadian maps were in metric while many of the CIA maps were in imperial units.  Both websites were current.  Since they are government based sites their content is based on government census information (the most recent being 2006 in Canada).  Each website also has an index with hyperlinks to connect the user with related maps and content.  Finally, the format of each website is great as they are quick to access, easy to read, colourful and even allow the user to zoom.  I then compared these online atlases to a print World Book Atlas from my classroom.  This atlas also met Riedling’s criteria.  The publisher was well known (Rand McNally), the content was fairly current (2007), the scales were accurate yet diverse (both miles and kilometres) and functional indexes for Canadian and World locations/landforms.

Lesson nine taught me a lot about reference materials that I use on a daily basis as a Social Studies teacher.  I learned that most maps originate from government agencies/information and are produced by very few publishers.  As a result, I learned that most maps are authentic and accurate.  If only evaluating other reference materials was this easy!