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 in the corona virus crisis for example. Thanks to globalisation, the virus spread quickly all over the world. Now that we are trying to fight the virus it doesn't only matter how our own country is doing but how the countries around the world are handling the situation and that way we kind of are world citizens as well, because the virus affects us all. On the other hand, nationalism is strong right now and this can be seen in the idea of taking care our own first: many countries are stocking up the vaccines and keeping the borders closed.

As I did my power point presentation about how globalisation affects the environment I also found out some new information. To me the main point about globalisation and environment is that globalisation could be used to solve the big environmental crisis that we have by marketing and producing more green and sustainable options on transport, energy and other kind of industry around the world.

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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 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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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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