As this week´s journalist I am going to tell the dynamic of our group for this work about a “Treasure Hunt”. This practice is divided into three main parts (Cartographic projections, Media distortions and find another Treasure Hunt), so, after several "general meetings" to discuss new ideas and focus content, we decided to distribute the work in pairs. When the parts were done, every pair had to explain to the star and to other colleagues what had worked and learned so that everyone knew correctly the development and purpose of the practice. For this practice, we believe that this is a useful dynamic for two reasons: first, the work is distributed more easily and each one of us work some contents; second, because the rest of the contents are explained to you by your peers, and vice versa. Therefore, your communication skills are improved.
The first part of this practice was an example of Treasure Hunt related to cartographic projections: we had to choose two different countries (one European and one non-european) and compare their representations in three different map projections (Mercator, Robinson and Azimuthal). So we had to search the web for information about this projections, their differences and conveniences. We chose United Kingdom and Australia, and the differences were pretty clear: a clear example of how media (in this case, maps) can influence the view of the world we have. Second part of this work was find a media that distorts or can distort children´s view about the world or reality. We chose videogames, especially Call of Duty Modern Warfare series, as an example. First-person shooters desensitise and trivialise war. We found a video about a particular stage of Call of Duty MW2, called “No Russian”, in which the main objective for you as player was to shoot indiscriminately at people in an airport, with no further explanation or sense. Last part of this practice was find another example of Treasure Hunt in the web. We found a Treasure Hunt about animals of the world (hence the "jungle" part of the title, bad joke, i know it!); for this task we ask children to find in which country certain exotic animals live. For this purpose we provide kids with some zoo´s website addresses, where they can find information of such animals.
For all those tasks I searched our peers blogs and another websites, where i left comments. I found useful information for description of cartography maps, videogames and internet treasure hunts in (among others, please check out our pearltree):
T8T Team's Blog
Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM)
Mike Seccombe.(March 26 2003)."Propaganda games give a distorted view of reality".Sydney Morning Herald.
and
Lexington County School District One
The final goal of this Treasure Hunt is we have to learn how to teach children search for information in the web for specific tasks, and through our cooperation and working methods I think we managed to achieve this purpose.
JOURNALIST OF THE WEEK: JAVIER MARÍN GARCERÁN
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