What Matters Depends on Where You Get Your Newspaper

Boy did I want to give this website a BIG thumbs up, but ultimately I could not. 

This "newseum" hosts the first page of of nearly 500 newspapers from over 50 countries around the globe. It holds the promise of letting a visitor scan the front page of each of those newspapers. Now that's interesting! Really! 

I checked in one day not long ago and saw that a road race to benefit the needy and a  terrorist attack were the big two stories for The Sacramento Bee. Meanwhile, along the same half of the USA, The Anchorage Daily News was focused on new methods for making sand work better on icy roads during the coming winter and how President Chavez is offering free heat to Venezuelans. See? Interesting.

My half-hearted endorsement comes from several items. It lists papers in a few different groupings such as world region (Caribbean, Middle East, European, etc.), alphabetically, or bypins on a map, but only the regional list is useful. The pages are a tad load intensive and can slow down viewing. Also, other than a peek at each page, there's not much here. The analysis of what each paper deems "newsworthy" is left to you to examine. 

Still, if you're the curious type give it a peek at

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp 

Coloring our World Views

I first heard about The Atlas of the Real World by Daniel Dorling while listening to a podcast on an NPR show. (I don't recall which show.) The topic proved interesting enough that I decided to search for it on the Internet.

The concept is simple: Show how the world is, not through pie charts or bar graphs, but by land mass. (This area of study is called cartography and is sometimes subject to heated debates as a means of showing information.) Still, it can make for some interesting discussions.

E.g. if you follow this link http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/the-atlas-of-the-real-world/ you can see some of the maps from the book. You should be prepared to be a little weirded out by the "maps" as they look completely foreign in their warped formations. As you review more of them, it becomes much easier to assess what's being demonstrated.

These are the types of discoveries that get me enthused as a teacher. I cannot help but think that such a book -or even concept- would be great fun for students of all ages to explore in social studies and apply in math. So, for example, if students generated a bar graph of the obesity rates throughout the world they could then map it using a cartographer approach to make it more meaningful. Bar and pie charts are great but leave a lot of personal connections on the wayside.

Anyway, it's worth looking this book over. If nothing else, it may color your view of the world differently, not for better or worse, but differently.