A comprehensive powerpoint on the geography of the Southeast Asian region. This was completed for a masters level course and is intended for community college or high school students. Includes many case studies from throughout Southeas Asia.
AUDIENCE THEORY -CULTIVATION THEORY - GERBNER.pptx
Southeast Asia Geography
1. John Doe Community College Geography 100: World Regional Geography March 15, 2009 Downloadable for free from http://newschoolgeography.blogspot.com Sources can be found on final slides
Hi there. My name is Chris Calvert and this is a presentation for GCU 675 – “Title Here”. As my unit 2 assignment for this course I’ve chosen to create a unit on Southeast Asia for a community college level introductory course in World Regional Geography. I chose Southeast Asia as this where I’ve spent about half of my life. I grew up in Singapore and graduated from a high school there. I later lived in and taught in Singapore and Hong Kong (more east asia). I now currently live in Manila, in the Philippines. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to many of the countries in Southeast Asia, so I have a little first hand experience in the region, but I’m still no expert. This presentation is 120 slides long and would be taught over a period of 2 to 3 class periods of about 60 minutes each. What I’ll try to do with this voiced over powerpoint is not teach the class, but instead talk about how I would teach these lessons given the slides that I’ve created. One reason is that I use a lot of visuals when I teach geography to try and get students interested and start a dialogue. I find this much better for student learning than just writing down notes. There is so much to discuss about Southeast Asian Geography, so in this presentation I hope to hit on the basics while at the same time focusing on some interesting case studies from different countries throughout the region. If I were to really teach this class, I would have a website where students can download these presentations for their own use. Since I’m not there yet, I’ve just written the URL of my blog (which is a work in progress).
The format for this presentation is as follows. First it’s important to discuss why I think Southeast Asia is a really important region in the world. What does it offer? What lessons can we learn from it? Of course, what countries are there and what is interesting about them? Next is a look at the physical stuff or what I like to think of as what Southeast Asia would look like if people weren’t there. I think it’s important to do the physical geography before the human geography as I believe although we’ve changed our environments quit a lot, and without being an environmental determinist here, the physical landscape does a good job of explaining life in Southeast Asia. Then we’ll look at the human stuff – cultural landscapes as well as how humans have changed the physical landscape in Southeast Asia. I’ll end with my thoughts on where Southeast Asia is heading and throughout try to inspire and think of ways to get students to do their own research on topics that interest them about the region.
The format for this presentation is as follows. First it’s important to discuss why I think Southeast Asia is a really important region in the world. What does it offer? What lessons can we learn from it? Of course, what countries are there and what is interesting about them? Next is a look at the physical stuff or what I like to think of as what Southeast Asia would look like if people weren’t there. I think it’s important to do the physical geography before the human geography as I believe although we’ve changed our environments quit a lot, and without being an environmental determinist here, the physical landscape does a good job of explaining life in Southeast Asia. Then we’ll look at the human stuff – cultural landscapes as well as how humans have changed the physical landscape in Southeast Asia. I’ll end with my thoughts on where Southeast Asia is heading and throughout try to inspire and think of ways to get students to do their own research on topics that interest them about the region.
These are just some questions that I think are important to keep in mind whenever one studies a quote on quote region – with one of the most interesting here being whether or not Southeast Asia is even a region. In some ways there are major differences between countries in Southeast Asia so we’d be wise not to clump them together in every facet of geography.
This is a fun graphic which you can create with a site called wordle.net – basically you type in words and it just displays them in a fun way. At the middle or high school level I might have students make their own and put em up around the room or run them in a slideshow or something. I think it’s important that students understand at the outset why a region has importance. These words are here to catch student’s attention. I might ask if they’ve heard of these words in a Southeast Asian context, or ask what words are missing, or if any shouldn’t be there. It’s just an ice breaker and sort of a ‘big thoughts’ opening to the unit.
Always important to situate the region geographically of course. You’ll see I pretty much always like simple slides with this one being pretty simple, but easy to see and read even if printed out in small ‘handout’ style on powerpoint. Helpful for students as they go through notes later on. I’ve also found that the safest background text color combo in terms of not having a problem in any type of room (glare, etc…) is a black background with yellow or white font.
The black background is also useful when pasting in Google Earth shots as the frame for Google Earth is already black so it blends right in nicely. With this shot I’d mention that students should download Google Earth and pretty much always have it open whenever on the internet so they can georeference stuff easily. This is as zoomed out as you can go in Google Earth, and I’d simply point to Southeast Asia and mention how it got its name “South of China” “East of India” This scale shows both China, India, and the whole of Southeast Asia.
A large scale image showing all of Southeast Asia. India and China still visible. I’d mention how Southeast Asia is broken up into ‘mainland’ and ‘insular’ regions in with this image. I’ve drawn a measurement in Google Earth to show the ‘width’ of Southeast Asia (about 3,600 miles) from west to east. Little shorter North to South and not the largest of regions we will cover in the class, but worth mentioning to get an idea. This shot here also shows some ocean depth and it would be useful to mention the large continental shelf which extends from the Asian Mainland.
A final shot of the physical geography, this one with better land topography shown. Important things to notice here is how green Southeast Asia is (lying pretty much exclusively in the tropics) compared with desert regions at more northern latitudes. Also useful here to see how mainland southeast asia is affected by the topography to the north of it. More will be discussed about that later on.
A final map, and I chose this as the best political map of Southeast Asia, comes from the very useful Map Library online at UT Austin. I might mention how colonization has played a big part in the history and of the region as well as how political boundaries have been created. The relative size of Indonesia, the largest country in the region, might be mentioned as well as a recap of ‘mainland’ and ‘insular’ southeast asia to really hammer home that point.
My intention with the slides that follow is to give a very very brief intro into the 11 countries of the region, talk about some interesting things about each, and show some photos of physical and human aspects of geography in these areas. This would be a good time to try and elicit some dialogue from students about what they already know about the region. I haven’t put these countries in any order at all, it’s totally random.
So I’ve kept this layout for the slides with a map or a photo as the main feature of the slide with the country name, location map, and satellite image staying the same for each slide. I like the idea of putting the English and local name of the country at the top for comparison purposes.
This is a photo of Ton Le Sap Lake, an important body of water in Cambodia, there’s a case study about this later.
A Cambodian farmer. I’d mention here about the relative importance of primary activities such as farming in many Southeast Asia countries including Cambodia, even in the 21 st century. I’ve taken these pictures from a number of different sources, which you can find on the final slide of this presentation. I think good visuals inspire conversation in a geography classroom.
Indonesia’s next. The satellite image isn’t oriented towards the north in this one, but that can be explained. I’d quickly point to the different parts of Indonesia including some of the famous places like Jakarta, Bali, Aceh, and Irian Jaya.
The most volcanic country in the world, along the ring of fire. Indonesia’s beautiful and mystical volcanoes, especially on Java, the one of the most densely populated islands on the planet.
And of course, poverty and population growth, which I believe go hand in hand will be a theme of my presentation and the pictures in this introductory section. One cannot forget that Southeast Asia is a very poor region, it’s growing relatively fast, and it contains some of the world’s largest mega cities including Jakarta, where this baby is sitting on a railroad track which doubles as a place to sell vegetables.
Brunei is a very unique country not only in Southeast Asia, but in the world. This map shows the fact that it’ “split into 2 parts”. One probably needs to remind students where this country is. It could be a chance to talk about Borneo, the worlds 3 rd largest island and the countries that make up Borneo, with Brunei being one of them in the north part of the island.
I’d discuss how Brunei is very much like a middle eastern country in the sense that it sits on top of very plentiful oil reserves. Also it’s a predominately Muslim nation, as most of insular Southeast Asia is. This photo shows a mosque and an oil rig, which is fitting for Brunei.
The Sultan of Brunei is known to many as the worlds richest man and this picture proves the point. Brunei is a country of great contrast, the ‘emirate’ in Southeast Asia I like to think of it as. One of those countries that doesn’t seem to fit with the countries surrounding it in many ways.
Another Southeast Asian anomaly is Singapore, one of the most economically developed countries in the entire world, with a very high quality of life. Totally different than every other country in the region. Important to point to its location on the overview map and make mention of it’s tiny size only about 600 sq miles.
Hard to find a good image for physical geography in Singapore as it’s really small and not overly exciting in terms of landscape, but climate wise there is a lot of action. I’d mention how it’s sometimes known as the lighting capital of the world because of it’s frequency of lightning strikes and the relative severity of these given the super high population density of Singapore.
Multiculturalism is a good way to discuss Singapore and something that Singaporeans are proud of. I’d mention this statue ‘the merlion’ which is Singapore’s mascot but named because of a mistake (Raffles saw a tiger and thought it was a lion). Also, I’d mention the ‘durian shaped’ architecture of ‘The Esplanade Theater’ in the background. The war memorial (when japanese came to singapore) and the Swissotel (a reminder of its international importance in the global economy) are all in this shot, very handy indeed!
I found this while researching. I guess the Merlion was in fact struck by lighting sometime in 2009 – just threw this in for fun! Also, the chinese say it’s bad feng shui because of the new ‘Singapore Flyer’, as seen in the picture to the right.
The format for this presentation is as follows. First it’s important to discuss why I think Southeast Asia is a really important region in the world. What does it offer? What lessons can we learn from it? Of course, what countries are there and what is interesting about them? Next is a look at the physical stuff or what I like to think of as what Southeast Asia would look like if people weren’t there. I think it’s important to do the physical geography before the human geography as I believe although we’ve changed our environments quit a lot, and without being an environmental determinist here, the physical landscape does a good job of explaining life in Southeast Asia. Then we’ll look at the human stuff – cultural landscapes as well as how humans have changed the physical landscape in Southeast Asia. I’ll end with my thoughts on where Southeast Asia is heading and throughout try to inspire and think of ways to get students to do their own research on topics that interest them about the region.
The format for this presentation is as follows. First it’s important to discuss why I think Southeast Asia is a really important region in the world. What does it offer? What lessons can we learn from it? Of course, what countries are there and what is interesting about them? Next is a look at the physical stuff or what I like to think of as what Southeast Asia would look like if people weren’t there. I think it’s important to do the physical geography before the human geography as I believe although we’ve changed our environments quit a lot, and without being an environmental determinist here, the physical landscape does a good job of explaining life in Southeast Asia. Then we’ll look at the human stuff – cultural landscapes as well as how humans have changed the physical landscape in Southeast Asia. I’ll end with my thoughts on where Southeast Asia is heading and throughout try to inspire and think of ways to get students to do their own research on topics that interest them about the region.