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Period 5. Conclusion

 The course is almost at the end and it is time for the conclusion. I have to say I really liked the course and learned a lot new from it. To be honest, I think this course should be mandatory to all the biology students who will teach geography as a second subject because this course deals with topics that are present in school. Doing this course will definitely make me a better teacher.  I must admit that I suffered from the ignorance as Hans Rosling calls it. I think this is a big problem with many ecology students like myself who have used to the fact that humans are ruining our ecosystem and causing extinction of many species. After doing this course my world view is now more positive. I still acknowledge that we as humans have huge problems to solve in the future but I now have more faith in succeeding in solving problems like climate change, plastic and the loss of biodiversity. I have understood that we have already done a lot of things right and many things are going to the be
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Period 4. Globalisation

 On the final period our topic was globalisation and how it affects the world. It was maybe the topic I learned least new about. It is probably because it is a topic people my age have studied since high school. To me a good example of globalisation is the Suez canal obstruction which happened in March 2021. I think a news article about it could have been included on the course material as it illustrated so well how globalisation affects us and how it works.    I still watched the videos listed and picked up some interesting points. I found the "Global citizen" video and the idea about people as global citizens rather than citizens of a nation very interesting. Idea of humans as global citizens is beautiful as it would mean everyone is on the same level and no nation is more or less important than the other. However, that is not the reality and I think nationalism is now more important than ever.  The mix of globalisation and being global citizen and nationalism can be seen i
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Period 3. Changes in land cover: The other inconvenient truth

 This week the topic is changes in land cover. When I think about the subject the first thing that comes to my mind is deforestation, especially cutting down the rainforests for farming and for cattle. In Brazil the problem is meat and soy bean production, in Indonesia it's the palm oil industry, or at least that's what I think I started by watching Jonathan Foley's TED Talk about agriculture. I already knew that a huge area of the world is used for food production but it still came to me as a bit of a shock that the area used for agriculture is 60 times bigger than urban areas. The thing that really surprised me and what I learnt most new about was the water aspect of agriculture as well as it's affects to climate change.  The fact that agriculture spends so much water that it could fill up 7305 Empire State buildings every day sounded unbelievable.    I wonder why these things aren't really talked about in media or at school. It's probably - as Foley said - be
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Period 2. Population Growth

 This week's topic is population growth. For me the subject is pretty familiar and I actually kept a lesson about population growth in Finland to a class of 9th graders a couple weeks ago. I still learned a lot from the listed videos and websites. Especially the video explaining population growth with toilet paper rolls was very clever and is something I could copy into a classroom from Hans Rosling. It clearly shows why the population growth won't stop in a long time even though the fertility rate is getting smaller and smaller: because there will be a lot more adults in the future than now and they will have children of their own.   I personally find the subject pretty fascinating since the population has grown so much even in my lifetime but also a bit controversial, since the world can't take anymore people and it would be necessary for the population to stop growing but at the same time Finland is having huge problems because the fertility rate is too low and there are
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Period 1. Mind map making & some thoughts about equality

I spent last night doing my mind map about equality of the world and what slows down the development towards it. Even though Gapminder taught me that the world is not as unequal as I thought, we still have a long way to go. When doing my mind map it came to my mind that there are still so many problems on the way of equality. We have a long way to go. Laws can be easily changed and money raised to the poor, hunger and diseases can be cured, but how do we change people's minds and attitudes? Like said in the previous post, personal rights have gone only worse during the last couple of years. How do we stop misogynism? How do we tell the conservative Islamic countries that women deserve the same rights as men or to African people that mutilating women is wrong when they have practised these things for centuries? My mind map about things slowing down progress towards equality.   I know that the world has gone forward too, good examples are the gay rights laws during the last couple of
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Period 1. Thoughts about video by Michael Green and SDGs

I watched Michael Green's TED Talk about the SDGs yesterday. The SDGs are already familiar to me because they have been discussed about in teacher studies last year. I must admit though, I can't remember all of the 17 goals. However,  we never thought about how it is currently going or is it even possible to achieve the goals or how do we measure the progress. That's why the video was interesting and I learned a lot.   I'm sad but not surprised to hear that the 2030 goals will be achieved in 2094 with the current phase. Especially now with the ongoing Corona situation, I think we are even further away from the goal. However, I was glad to see that many countries are making progress in many things. I learned that SDG 6: Water and sanitation is sadly not one of them. I personally think this is one of the most important goals because it affects both humans and nature. If we know that some countries are left far behind from the goal, the rich countries should act now and d
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Period 1. Introduction: Gapminder's Ignorance Project and Dollar Street

  I went to the Gapminder website and did the Gapminder test. The test was about how well you know or think you have an idea of how the people of the world are doing on average considering things like schooling, healthcare and access to electricity and also about how the world has or is changing considering population growth and endangered species. All of the questions were about topics studied in human geography and topics that have been discussed already in high school. My score was 4/13. I couldn’t believe it and am totally surprised. How did I do so badly? As a future geography teacher I thought I had a clue about these topics. I was thinking too negatively about most of the things. Turns out, the world population in total is doing far better than I thought.    After doing the test I watched the Ignorance Project TED Talk. I did worse than chimpanzees! Turned out, I was not the only one. Majority of the people in Western countries have no idea how the world is doing today, no
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