Go to Google Maps, right now, and sign in to your Google account. Now, from the main page of Maps, you can make your own, customized version of a tiny slice of Google's massive world. Offering a robust selection of features and options, the entire interface is remarkably easy to use. I know about it through my wholly enchanting Urban Planning course. The material rallies itself around a series of customized maps that we have to make throughout the course of the class all on different cities around the planet. This week, we're working on Tehran, the capital of Iran, and it is singularly the best project I've ever had to do outside of a theatre course. I am becoming familiar with areas of the world that I would have never even considered to exist.
The really spectacular thing is how open-ended the projects are. This is truly the first time they've been implemented in a University of Illinois classroom. Here is the syllabus I was given, abridged:
"This is a weekly exercise. Each week students will focus on one city of their choice within the region that is subject of the class readings that week. Each student will create his or her own google maps . . . The google map they create each week has three components: spatial explorations, textual explorations, and own narrative or interpretation.
The criteria for assessment of these components are their thoughtfulness and the extent to which they can reveal the complexity of cities and indeed the contradictory nature of city as a process and product. The students are expected to look for and show how for different people the same part of the city is experienced and represented differently. For example . . . how within the same city different neighborhoods are contrasting in terms of their physical attributes (texture of built form, density, greenery, sanitation and infrastructure) . . .
Audio visual exploration (10 points) Audio visual explorations include images, film clips, sounds clips that students find on their city of choice or for a specific location in that city. The students will tag those info to their city and specific locations within that city on their google map. Each week a new city will be added to students google map. By the end of the semester students’ google map represents their audio virtual travel around the world.
Textual exploration (10 points) The textual exploration includes current events coverage by popular media on the students’ city of choice. The current events could go back as far as one or several years. By popular media we mean non-academic text you can find on any aspect of people’s life in that city.
Own narrative: (10 points) Your own interpretation and entry explaining why you chose those links and how you interpret the information is an important component of your Travel Around the World assignment. Your narrative will help us understand why you chose the info uploaded on your google map how you see those important, what were your thinking for choosing and linking those info to your google map. Remember we have no way of knowing why you have selected certain entries to be linked unless you share your thought process. This will help us know how thoughtfully you have gone about your spatial and textual exploration of the city you are travelling through for that week."
Holy shit. Basically, we are unrestricted in how we want to approach each city. At first, I scoffed at the immensity of what had been laid at my feet, until I started to work on my map.
I am supposed to explain how and why a chunk of Earth teeming with humans, buildings, cars and planes works the way it does, all while looking at it from above, through blogs, and reading new stories. If I were to start this project and have a successor take up the challenge of completing it upon my death, it would probably claim hundreds of lives.
This, however is not a complaint.
I heartily applaud my professor, a one Faranak Miraftab, a woman truly enchanted with her field of study, for embracing technology as she has. Not the most savvy with a computer, as evidenced by her frequent but very forgivable problems with PowerPoint presentations, she has nonetheless decided to soldier on, laying the Earth itself at our feet, having complete faith in our ability to manipulate the internet in a way that she knows we can.
And you know what? I'm learning.
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