2.3.1 Knowing Where You Are Going
Are you one of those people who can easily navigate their way around when walking or driving through a city? Do you always know which way is north or south when walking through trail in a forest or on a long bicycle ride in the country. If your answer is no, you are not alone. One of the most important aspects of being spatially literate is not only knowing where you are as was described in the last section, but also knowing where you are going. This involves more than simply being able to take directions and successfully arriving at a destination. It requires that you develop a good sense of your surroundings (your street, neighborhood, and city), and how these locations are positioned relative to other places in your surrounding environment. Here we focus on two very critical aspects of spatial literacy: direction and distance.
The concept of direction has always served a great importance in society. Humans living in hunter-gatherer societies required a keen sense of direction in order to bring food back to their groups. The Roman Empire was able to successfully expand its reach by sending armies off to conquer countries in various directions from Rome. Direction was critical in the days of global exploration when Christopher Columbus and other explorers were attempting to locate “undiscovered” lands across the oceans.Today, we are likely less aware of direction because we have devices that provide this knowledge for us. We don’t need to think which way is west because the GPS receiver in our cars or the mapping app on our phones tells us how to get there. While some may argue that digital technologies have made us lose our sense of direction, it can also be said that digital technologies can help us better understand it.
Find your location in Map 2.3.1 by clicking the Find My Location icon below the zoom buttons in the left side of the map. The Location box points to where you are, but it does not tell you in what direction everything is around you. Every web-based mapping application such as this one is oriented like an ordinary map, where north is at the top of your screen, south is at the bottom, west is to the left, and east is to the right. That is the basics of direction. From this little bit of knowledge you should be able to figure out which direction is northeast, northwest, southwest and southeast. Of course some web-based mapping applications allow you to change your orientation, but the initial map you see is typically oriented in the way explained here.
Map 2.3.1
Consider five places that you regularly visit each week (e.g. school, work, restaurant, friend’s house) and zoom out until all five places can be seen on the map in front of you. In what direction is each of these places from your current location? Now, consider three natural features (e.g. a river, mountain, forest) that you know are closest to you. In what direction is each of these places from your current location? Finally, think of where three of your relatives (parents, siblings, etc.) live. Again, in what direction are they located from you? Next time someone asks you for directions, try to explain to them where they should go by using the terms of north, south, east and west. Use these terms when describing to another person where something is located. Most importantly, you should constantly be thinking about these terms whenever you are thinking about where you are and where you are going. While this exercise and the knowledge behind it may appear trivial, developing a spatially literate brain is not.
2.3.2 Going the Distance
The second concept of spatial literacy covered here is distance. In general, there are two ways in which we describe distance: relative and absolute. Relative distance is the way in which most of discuss distance in our daily lives. We use terms such as “close to”, “near”, “far”, “short” and “long” to describe the proximity of two locations from one another. These terms are of course ambiguous, because what “far” means to one person could mean something different to another. For example, if you commute over an hour to get to school everyday, your concept of “far” is likely different than someone who can walk to school in 10 minutes. Nonetheless, relative terminology is extremely useful for most of us when communicating absolute difference is challenging, either because we don’t know the absolute distance or the person to whom we are talking has troubles understanding a measured distance.
Absolute distance is a specific measurement between two locations. It is the measurement you receive when you ask your mapping app to provide you with directions from one location to another. In general, distances are provided to you in either metric or imperial units, the former being adopted by most countries in the world, while very few countries still use imperial units. It is important to know the difference between metric and imperial to be able to convert between them. Go back to Map 2.3.1 and use the measure tool to determine the distance between your home and where you go to school. What is this distance in miles? What is this distance in kilometers? If some told you that you need to travel 16 kilometers in order to arrive at your destination, how far is that in miles? If someone told you to travel 5 miles, how far is that in kilometers? What countries would you most likely receive directions in miles or kilometers? Answer these questions successfully and you are well on your way to training your brain in spatial literacy.