Today@Dal

From Friday's Chronicle Herald:

Somalia. Tokyo. Beijing.

Students today may know how to find these places using Google, but a Dalhousie University geography professor says they have trouble pinpointing them on good old-fashioned maps.

James Boxall, the director of Dalhousie’s Geographical Information Sciences Centre, says when he gives his first-year geography students a quiz at the beginning of the semester, they only get about half the answers right.

“I ask them things like the location of certain countries that I think are most popular in the news. So, for example, where is Japan? … Where is Afghanistan? Where is Iraq? Very, very basic stuff.”

And students’ scores aren’t getting any better. Thirty years ago, students on average answered about 70 per cent of his questions correctly.

“Their understanding of the most basic, basic elements of the world has been getting worse over time,” said Boxall, who was appointed last week as a governor of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society.

“I think maybe we’re relying too much on Wikipedia and Google Earth, where the technology will answer the question right in front of us. It trivializes learning and knowledge.”

Read the rest of this article online.