World Regional Geography
World Regional Geography
The Power of Place
The American Telecourse
of
The Annenberg/CPB Multimedia Collection
1. Objectives 2. The Challenge 3. Penetrating insights 4. 52 stories
5. Stories of people 6. All over the world 7. Geography based on 8. Academic Advisors
Unit 1. Introduction Unit 2. Europe:Confronting New Challenges Unit 3. Russia's Fracturing Federation Unit 4.North America: The Post-Industrial Transformation
Unit 5. The Geographic Dynamic of the Pacific Rim Unit 6. Middle America: Collision of Cultures Unit 7. South America: Continent of Contrasts Unit 8. North Africa/Southwest Asia: The Challenge of Islam
Unit 9. Sub-Saharan Africa: Realm of Reversals Unit 10.South Asia: Aspiring India Unit 11. China and its Sphere Unit 12. Southeast Asia: Betweeen the Giants
The complete Telecourse package How to use The Power of Place Arrangements for use
Objectives
The study of World Regional Geography has two objectives. First, it explains the modern world's great geographic realms and their human and physical contents, their assets and liabilities, links and barriers, potentials and prospects. Second, it introduces geography itself, the discipline that links human societies and natural environments.
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The Challenge
THE POWER OF PLACE: World Regional Geography, a new geography telecourse, embraces this challenge. The telecourse builds an understanding of geography by examining the eleven regions of the world and their interconnections. What are the physical and human patterns found there?
How is each distinguished by a linkage between the human and physical world?
Perspectives from physical, political, historical, economic, and cultural geography are used to characterize the individual regions.
In this way, viewers gain insight into the distinctive landscapes of the world's regions and the ways in which they are knit together into a spatial framework. Premiering on PBS in the U.S.A. in fall 1996, this telecourse provides a creative and insightful examination of the many geographic forces currently at work in shaping the complex features of the world's civilizations and environments.
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Penetrating insights
THE POWER OF PLACE: World Regional Geography includes 26 half-hour programs providing penetrating insights into a range of geographic issues around the globe. The series is the collaborative effort of an international team of educational broadcasters and geographers in the U.S.A., Australia, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Principal responsibility for production design and coordination, and for creation of the maps, was provided by Cambridge Studios in Boston, Massachusetts. This partnership has created the highest-quality series by allowing each team to develop programs in proximity to its own base. The geographic diversity of the teams has resulted in a unique global perspective on the subject of world regional geography.
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52 stories
The 26 programs typically contain two 10 minute documentary-style case-studies.
Each fulfills two major goals: to characterize an individual region within the eleven geographic realms explored and to communicate an important concept from a variety of systematic approaches (i.e., physical, political, historical, economic, and cultural). To motivate the study of geography, we have used television to do what it does best: to tell compelling stories and to give the veiwers a feel for the placeÐsomething difficult to reproduce in other media. These are stories that really teach geography.
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Stories of people
Each case study tells the story of people whose lives are shaped by the geographical forces in question. Often, they are stories about research geographers trying to understand spatial variation in an era of rapid global change. In every case, we explore a vital regional and conceptional issue that can be further illuminated trough geographic analysis. Through state-of-the art computer-generated maps and animation, the programs present these issues in a highly visual and intellectualy rigorous manner.
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All over the world
The series takes the viewer to Lanzhou, China, to experience the contrasting lives and livelihoods of its Muslim and Han Chinese inhabitants; to Iceland, to discover the ways climate and ocean in a particular location have influenced the prosperity, and recent decline, of its fishing industry; to Jerusalem, to examine how territorial issues create a distinctive religious and secular landscape as a result of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict; to Chicago, where competition between urban and agricultural interests at the edge of the city threaten prime agricultural land; to Dikhatpura, India, to focus on a small farming village reliant upon irrigation to overcome the disadvatages of its local environment. In addition to the case studies, each program provides seven minutes of wrap-around material designed to strengthen particular geographic concepts and to generalize from the case, to the larger region or realm. The feature the commentary of noted geography professor, author, and ABC commentator, H.J. de Blij.
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Geography based on
The programs are organized around the text written by H.J. de Blij and Peter O. Muller, Geography:Realms, Regions and Concepts.
The authors are the two senior academic advisors for the series. The book is published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The course also includes a study guide and faculty guide, also published by Wiley.
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Academic Advisors for THE POWER OF PLACE
AUSTRALIA: Kevin O'Connor, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
FRANCE: Jacques Levy, Sorbonne University, Paris, France
JAPAN: Kenzo Fujiwara, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan
THE NETHERLANDS: Rob van der Vaart, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
SWEDEN: Solveig Martensson, University of Lund, Lund, Sweden
THE UNITED STATES:
Osa Brand, Associates of American Geographers, Washington, D.C.
H.J. de Blij, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, FL
Edward Fernald, Florida State University, Coral Gables, FL
Gil Latz, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
Dan McDermott, Montgommery College, Rockville, MD
Peter O. Muller, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL
Richard Williams, U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole,MA
THE POWER OF PLACE: World Regional Geography provides a creative and insightful examination of the many geographic forces currently shaping our contemporary world.
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UNITS CASE STUDIES
Unit 1. Introduction
Program 1: Earthly Visions
Introduces the overarching geographical concepts with an emphasis on human/environmental interaction and physical geography.
A geographer at NASA teaches astronauts, and by extension all of humanity, to "see" the Earth in a new way and to record it photographically
<Program 2: Boundaries and Borderlands
Applies the conceptual tools of the geographer: relative location, distance and scale, realms and regions, and human/environmental interaction, all through a spatial perspective

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A single Mexican mother of four children illegally smuggles cigarettes across the U.S. border into El Paso, Texas, to support her family, embodying the geographic issues that divide, and unite, these two realms in a borderland area
Unit 2. Europe: Confronting New challenges
Program 3: Supranationalism and Devolution Coexistence of French and German culture in Stasbourg.
Recent birth of Slovakia and Czech Republic
Program 4: East Looks West Berlin's transition from a weakened and divided city to one of emerging importance.
Diffusion of democratic ideas throughout Poland
Program 5: The Transforming Industrial Coreland Analysis of Liverpool's once-thriving industrial economy, fallen to its marginal present-day role.
Focus on Randstad-Holland as an integral part pf the current European core
Program 6: Challenges on the Periphery The many challenges faced by Iceland, which exists on the cultural and physical periphery of Europe.
Back to Beginning Gradual decline of the once-central but now peripheral Andalucia region of Spain and its hopes for the future.
Unit 3. Russia's Fracturing Federation
Program 7: Facing Etnic and Environmental Diversity The question of independence in the ethnically mixed Republic of Dagestan in the face of the current devolutionary process.
The uncertainties of a harsh climate and poor infrastructure in the Russian countryside around Vologda.
Program 8: Central and Remote Economic Development The effects of the shift to a market economy on real estate values in St. Petersburg
Back to Beginning The difficulties of industrial production in Bratsk, Siberia
Unit 4. North America: The Post-Industrial Transformation
Program 9: Inner vs. 'Edge' Cities An "empowerment zone" proposal in inner-city Boston.
The pressure of suburban growth on agricultural communities surrounding Chicago.
Program 10: Ethnic Fragmentation in Canada The resistance of French-speakers to domination by English language in Quebec.
Vancouver as an emerging Pacific Rim metropolis
Program 11: Regions and Economies Competition for water resources in eastern Oregon.
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The incorporation of Japanese production techniques in the midwest U.S. automotive industry.
Unit 5. The Geographic Dynamic of the Pacific Rim
Program 12: The Japanese Paradox: Small Farms and Mega-Cities Predicting the best rice-farming methods in Tohoku in Northern Japan.
The morning commute of Tokyo businessman.
Program 13: Global Interaction How Singapore exploits its location to play a key commercial role in Pacific Asia.
Back to Beginning Australia's European roots and recent Asian influences in economic development.
Unit 6. Middle America: Collision of Cultures
Program 14: Migration and Conquest Migration patterns both within and outside of Mexico.
Back to Beginning The "cycles of consequest" borne by Maya peoples in Guatemala.
Unit 7. Continent of Contrasts
Program 15: Andes and Amazon Monitoring volcanic activity in Ecuador.
"Sustainable development" for the Amazon in northeast Brazil's Pára State
Program 16: Accelerating Growth Urban homesteaders in São Paulo, Brazil.
Back to Beginning The lure of an export economy in Santiago, Chili.
Unit 8. North Africa/Southwest Asia: The Challenge of Islam
Program 17: Sacred Space under Siege? Mapping the spatial variation in religious practice in Jerusalem.
Gaps between rich and poor, secural and fundamentalist, Turks in Istanbul.
Program 18: Population, Food Supply, and Energy Development Rapid population growth and agriculture in Egypt.
Back to Beginning Oil revenue, Muslim life, and new industries in Oman
Unit 9. Sub-Saharan Africa: Realms of Reversals
Program 19: The legacy of Colonization Disparity between elite and poor in the Ivory Coast.
A failed attempt at growth and poorly developed infra-structure in Gabon.
Program 20: Understanding Sickness, Overcoming Prejudice A spatial look at health and disease in Kenya.
Back to Beginning New land-reform policies in post-apartheid South Africa.
Unit 10. South Asia: Aspiring India
Program 21: Urban and Rural Contrasts A geographer studies Dehli as a multicultural, rapidly growing city.
Back to Beginning Local farmers reliant on irrigation in Dikhatpura, southwestern India.
Unit 11. China and Its Sphere
Program 22: Life in China's Frontier Cities The settlement of Lanzhou in northwestern China.
Struggling manufacturing industry in Shenyang.
Program 23: China's Metropolitan Heartland Physical location and government policy bolster development in Shanghai
Recent industrialization near Nanjing
Program 24: The Booming Maritime Edge Industrialization: the Nike experience in Guangdong
Back to Beginning Hsinchu Science Park in Taiwan
Unit 12. Southeast Asia: between the Giants
Program 25: Mainland Southeast Asia Prospects for development in isolated Laos.
Rice production in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam.
Program 26: Maritime Southeast Asia The growing importance of tourism in Indonesia.
Back to Beginning A geographer studies Malaysia's different ethnic groups.
The complete package of the telecourse includes the 26 half-hour television programs for distance-learning undergraduate courses, a Study Guide, a recommended textbook, and a Faculty Guide.

The Videocassettes
The 26-half-hour programs are available on VHS video-cassettes as resources for use by colleges and high schools or for informal learning.

The Textbook: GEOGRAPHY: Realms, Regions and Concepts, by H.J. de Blij and Peter O. Muller

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GEOGRAPHY:Realms, Regions and Concepts has a world-class reputation for providing the most authoritative, accurate, and complete presentation of world regional geography. It contains a wealth of special features that help students master the material, including Key Ideas and Consepts, boxed material on special topics, Systematic Essays, 10 Major Geographic Qualities of each realm, a "Realms in Transition" section, prononciation guides, a comprehensive glossary, an exhaustive bibliography, and a Gazetteer. Plus, it feautures a complete and extensive instructor's support package for the world regional geography course.

The Study Guide: Gil Latz, Portland State University

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The Study Guide is designed to help students achieve learning objectives on a weekly basis, to identify and follow course themes, to view the material from a geographical perspective, and to integrate the information from the programs and text. The Study Guide is organized into sections corresponding to the 26 programs and includes student objectives, program overviews, preview questions, regional overviews, case study themes, program summaries with comparisons of key points raised in each case study, review questions, and extended activities.

The Faculty Guide: Gil Latz, Portland State University

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The faculty Guide offers a week-by-week plan to colleges and universities that license THE POWER OF PLACE as a complete undergraduate college-credit course. Introductory material is designed to help both faculty who are new to telecourse teaching and experiences instructors. It offers special perspectives on teaching the telecourse and describes methods to aid students in understanding the complex issues and familiar feautures of world regional geography. The Faculty Guide complements the program format of the Study Guide by presenting information for each world region explored by the telecourse. This regional or unit-level organization includes: a unit overview, summary of the programs under review in a particular unit, program overview, clarification of the relationship between each case and the larger region, a unit summary, and test bank questions.



How You can Use THE POWER OF PLACE
  • As a college-credit telecourse fulfilling a one-semester requirement in world regional geography.
  • As a resource for teacher in-service programs in geography.
  • as discussion materials for high school classes in social studies, geography, environmental studies, political science, and economics.
  • As a video reference for public and university libraries and media centers.
  • As supplemental materials for use with undergraduate or graduate-level courses in human, economic, and physical geography, international economics, international relations, comparative government, environmental studies, and urban planning.
  • As an educational resource for businesses and corporations involved with global marketing, and for governmental, community, and service agencies dealing with regional and global planning.
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Arrangements for Use
THE POWER OF PLACE: World Regional Geography may be used as a television course for distant learners or as a video resource for classes, libraries, and media centers. To receive a preview cassette or further information please call the phone numbers listed below.

Colleges, universities, and other educational institutions may:

  • Purchase the programs on videocassette for use in the classroom or media center (available in Spring 1996):

    $389 for the series (26 half-hour programs on 13 VHS cassettes)
    $39.95 per cassette (2 consecutive half-hour programs)

  • Duplicate the programs for use in the classroom or media center at your institutions:

    $125 each copy of single series, up to four copies $500 for unlimited copies of a single series per institution.

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For information on the two options listed above, please call 1-800-LEARNER
or contact The Power of Place
  • License the use of POWER OF PLACE as a complete college-credit telecourse for distant learners beginning fall 1996:

    $500 per semester plus $15 per student

  • Acquire an off-air taping licence

    $200 per series

  • Acquire an off-satellite taping license

    $300 standard fee; $200 for Adult Learning Satellite Service Associates

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For information on the three options listed above, please call the PBS Adult Learning Service at 1-800-257-2578 or fax your request to 703-739-8495