How Childhood Stories can Spark a Passion for Geography and Travel
Background
I’m sitting down ready to write a blog article (written) about our recent trip to China. I have many photographs and for those who haven’t been to China I want to put those pictures into context by providing a series of maps with thumbnail pictures of visited locations documenting our journey. To view what I am talking about, check out the blog article about our November 2024 trip to China on my travel blog.
If you aren’t interested in my musings about childhood influences on creating a desire to travel and just want to create a clickable map… go here 😊
While I was thinking about the map solution, I reflected on my primary school years where one of the most enjoyable homework tasks I looked forward to completing was creating maps of countries and locations far away from Australia. I would spend hours recreating maps of locations and linking settings of stories both fact and fiction to those maps.
That created in me a hunger to travel which has stayed with me until this day. My parents were not travellers so the inspiration to travel can in part be attributed to where my imagination took me while reading books followed by attaching the content of those stories to a geospatial location on a map and finally embarking upon adventures to discover or create my own stories in new locations.
What four words could describe the path to wanderlust, which according to the Oxford dictionary means “a strong desire to travel”? In the context of this article, I have settled on Fables, Maps, Curiosity and Adventure. Tucked in there, somewhere between Curiosity and Adventure is an unspoken but critical word – Action! That is the difference between the person who is a vicarious traveller and the actual travelling adventurer.
The picture that is the feature image for this post is one of my favourite images. It is a place where imagination transports the young travellers to a place filled with treasure and challenges. Over time the adventures are not make believe played out in a bedroom or back yard, but are real life, initially maybe during a gap year or as a young university student on break or creating an overseas chapter as Joe, our son did by living and studying in Taiwan for a year.
Our family travels a lot for pleasure, not work. I love to use the travel to hone my multimedia creation skills in a foreign environment free of the comforts of home Wi-Fi and sleeping in the same bed and home rather than the expected 130 or more beds and sleeping places we expect to encounter on our journey next year. Not to mention the transport choices we will make between destinations in the 40 countries we will visit or the multitude of e-sims and seeking out Wi-Fi that might permit uploading of our videos and photographs when we try to share our adventures. Currency exchange, visas, Schengen area, ESTAs, conflict zones and more add a little more uncertainty and planning to the mix.
Relating travels to educating kids (and teachers)
While different to a teacher wrangling technology during a 40 minute lesson with 30 students day in day out – it has a higher level of difficulty and risk compared to sitting in the same office day and day out wondering what the next piece of cyber-mummification will occur to further reduce teacher and student productivity rather than implementing various work and study zones with acknowledged rules and risks. A topic for another day and for anyone who might take umbrage, I am a firm believer in our formal code of conduct and duty of care to students and staff which extends into this space (cyber security). Like the Berlin wall and the Mexico/USA wall – it is a costly thing to build and maintain at the expense of working on the root cause.
Ingraining in students how to put on a seatbelt and learning first aid is better than dropping all traffic speeds to say 15kmh, especially when we have people riding e-scooters without lights at night at 40kmh, to save battery on footpaths, because it is safer for the rider without any action to protect pedestrians.
To make it real and not use analogies, because of “time pressures” – most teachers do not ingrain user account sign in practices in grade one and two (as specified in the Australian national curriculum) – opting to use a common password for all students, establishing bad habits rather than “forcing” students to achieve their “login licence”. To me that is a better use of time rather than building a digital walled garden.
So, even though this article is about travel, maps, stories and imagination – I still relate the things I learn and practice to ways that student can have the most productive experience on their learning journey – and that sometimes involves not taking the easiest option. I shall now dismount my soapbox and continue with things arguably more fun, although my next heading sounds a little daunting. (It’s not – just wait until we get to “taxonomy”!)
Let’s get a bit “EdTechnical”
I want to share my adventures… what do I share? I need to share a little about ourselves as travellers, people so you as a listener can decide that this is a person who could be from my tribe sharing stories. Or if our backgrounds and styles don’t resonate, you move on. I will share the about us through a page rather than a post as we are who we are… and at our age, it probably isn’t going to change too much going forward.
The things we encounter will, on the other hand be new, fresh and hopefully blog-worthy.
If, as an actual traveller, I want to share general topics of interest I encounter or research related to the destinations I visit, what categories would they include. In the past I have looked for categories from YouTube and even asked CoPilot, however in the end, I found their offerings inadequate for my needs. This category list is mine and serves as a checklist to ensure that I have some headings to research on my destinations, so I come away with more than visual imprints, but knowledge about the past, present and future of the location.
- Food – Flat bread styles, local dishes that are spicy, sweet, healthy and odd
- Personal quests (ultralight aircraft, a place that has an interesting backstory for me)
- Culture, history, geography, scenery and interactions in the locations we visit
- Challenges, emotions and personal reflections
- Technical tips (about capturing and reporting)
- Travel and administrative tips that help us enjoy the experience more
I get very nerdy in sections below, but now a little humanism.
Linking my passion for travel and maps with my childhood
The article below is generated from some dot points I entered into my AI blog generator. I have read through the content and can’t disagree with the way it has been written. Most importantly I think the article ends well by highlighting the value of having the curiosity to embark upon journeys of wanderlust.
When sharing pictures of a location in a story where I can’t assume that people have visited the location or even know where it is, including a map along with an itinerary path helps set context for the person reading the article.
It amazes me how a small child can go from understanding location and distance in a backyard or schoolyard before moving on to streets, suburbs, cities, countries and continents extrapolating the idea of place and distance from a backyard context to a global one.
I feel sometimes that it is taught or learned intuitively rather than with intention. Maybe that’s why some people are destined to be travellers and others not.
Maps play such an important role in assisting the understanding of these concepts, or at least they have in my life.
Ok, enough from me, this next piece is a joint guided article created by AI from my outline prompts and reviewed and edited before including here.
Maps and Stories influence wanderlust in young students
Introduction:
Childhood is a time of wonder and imagination, where the seeds of curiosity are sown through the stories we hear and read. These stories often serve as a child’s first window to the world beyond their immediate surroundings, igniting a sense of adventure and discovery. In this blog post, we explore the profound connection between the tales we encounter in our early years and our understanding of geography, spatial awareness, and maps. We also delve into how these elements can nurture a lifelong passion for travel and learning about diverse cultures around the globe.
Stories as a Gateway to Geography:
From fairy tales set in enchanted forests to epic adventures across vast kingdoms, stories have a unique way of transporting young minds to distant places. These narratives not only entertain but also introduce children to different landscapes, climates, and environments. As they follow the journey of characters, children begin to form mental maps of these fictional worlds, developing an early understanding of distance, spatial relationships, and geographic features.
Developing Spatial Awareness through Storytelling:
Spatial awareness is an essential cognitive skill that helps children understand the relationships between objects in their environment. When children listen to or read stories that involve movement and exploration, they start to grasp concepts of direction, distance, and location. For instance, a story about a hero’s journey from a village to a castle can help a child visualize and comprehend the spatial dynamics involved in such a journey, laying the groundwork for more complex geographic thinking.
The Role of Maps in Storytelling:
Many beloved children’s books come with illustrated maps that chart the protagonist’s adventures. These maps serve as a visual aid, helping children to follow the narrative while enhancing their geographical literacy. By engaging with these maps, children learn to interpret symbols, scales, and directions, skills that are fundamental to understanding real-world geography. The map of Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood or the Marauder’s Map in the Harry Potter series are perfect examples of how fictional maps can captivate young minds and foster a love for cartography.
Cultivating a Passion for Travel:
As children grow, the stories that once fueled their imagination often translate into a desire to explore the real world. The places they read about become destinations on their travel bucket list, and the cultures they encounter in stories spark a curiosity to learn more. This passion for travel and discovery can lead to a deeper appreciation for the diversity of our world, encouraging a lifelong quest for knowledge and understanding.
Learning About Cultures Through Stories:
Storybooks are also a gateway to understanding different cultures and traditions. Through tales set in various parts of the world, children gain insights into the lifestyles, customs, and values of people from diverse backgrounds. This cultural awareness fosters empathy and open-mindedness, qualities that are essential for global citizenship.
Conclusion:
The stories we encounter in our childhood are more than just entertainment; they are powerful tools for learning and growth. By sparking an early interest in geography, spatial awareness, and maps, these narratives lay the foundation for a lifelong passion for travel and cultural exploration. As we nurture our children’s love for reading, we are also opening their minds to the wonders of the world, inspiring them to become curious, compassionate, and adventurous individuals.
Back to my original task, building clickable maps.
So that’s the end of the article written by the machine with some input from myself. Because this is all words it makes sense to actually provide a concrete example of what I initially set out to do which was to create a clickable map linking to albums that the viewer could choose to view or not. Just like a documentary, it is probably useful to provide an introduction to the location any adventures that may have occurred or feelings about the place and then let the pictures and videos tell the rest of the story.
From a technical standpoint it’s worthwhile mentioning that when you travel to different locations sometimes you don’t remember where you actually were in terms of a map location. That’s where your phone comes in handy because in most cases when you take a photograph the GPS location is attached to the photograph. What we noticed in China though is that the photographs and even the underlying map in Google Maps was offset against the satellite imagery by quite a few hundred metres. This also extended through to the location stored in the Apple iPhone of locations of photographs against the underlying maps. I haven’t tried to do a comparison with Bing maps but two out of the three big mapping solutions in China provide an inaccurate offset which you need to compensate for.
These maps divide our 10-day journey into epics that are logical trip chunks, chapters or sections. Each epic has a series of locations and events that as I have mentioned above are in fact stories. It is the locations and events that translate into albums that are the final destination people click on in the map. The map image below is what our trip beginning in March 2025 will involve. I am setting the context by providing time frames, a direction of travel and chunks or epics that I can guide you the reader along with me. It helps me to serve as an index even before I start the journey, a kind of library system for the items I will be collecting. IMPORTANT – The picture below is just a picture, I haven’t added any clickable elements to it… Further down there is a clickable map and you can experience first hand the usefulness of this approach.
This map, being the top level shows the “Epics” or segmented chapters of this 9.5 month journey. Why didn’t I use chapters? I like the term epic and I am sure each adventure will be an epic. When the map is live, clicking into an epic will show either thumbnails or the next of detail. For example in our first 6 days of travel we will be in Melbourne, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Seoul and Busan before heading across to Japan.
The first map sets the context of the trip showing thumbnail links to all the epics in that trip that take you to further maps which contain the stories attached to each of those epics. The story thumbnails, numbered, take you to either more maps, websites, albums, videos or whatever the multimedia element is for that story.
It is this detailed part of providing context, structure, consistency and containers for the content we want to share that is that part that will be refined as the journey unfolds.
A video description or podcast style voice over can provide reflection regarding the locations and events or at a higher level the epics.
Nothing is set in concrete and like the normal practice of teaching, the craft will be refined with experience.
How I organise the documentation of a journey.
By documentation I am talking about photos, videos, blog articles etc – not my air tickets, visas etc (for that I use OneNote and I will cover that as well)
This next part is a little detailed, nerdy and only interesting to those wanting to do a similar thing with their journey. Skip ahead if you start falling asleep.
Taxonomy – or cataloguing and sorting
How do I group together words, pictures and videos from 40 countries while still enjoying the travel experience?
If documenting the trip is a chore, it won’t happen. Without that word “prepare” it may be too difficult to execute, regardless of the level of commitment, dedication or resilience.
To ensure I capture content over the upcoming 9 months adventure to 40 countries, I need to divide the journey into sections, like a book. This will be handy when aligning content with dates. The two index items I always use are dates and location. The phone captures both date and location when I take a photograph, so I know I have that detail already captured. I have a plan of the countries and many of the cites we are visiting.
Just on dates and folder names. If you store images in folders (we all do) – group by year and then have the actual date of the photos folders follow the YYYY-MM-DD format eg 2025-01-26 rather than other combinations. Don’t be tempted to name folders Barcelona 2025-01-26, but if you must, reverse it (2025-01-26 – Barcelona) so that when you sort, your folders will sort nicely by capture date.
I have decided to use the terms from a computing methodology called “Agile” which bases its terms on storytelling. Essentially, I am coming full circle by using these terms to describe our next journey and I am experimenting here by applying the same convention to our recent China trip of only 10 days. The terms are Epics and Stories. There is no direct link between continents, countries and Epics. I have simply looked at the overall journey and broken it into 8 Epics that offer geographical groupings. These epics will contain their own stories that contain the ingredients of location, dates and events, but don’t need to be defined by any of them, so I can group several cities or locations into one story or refer back to events and locations from other stories. Epics though provide a closure to that time period and location.
Although this sounds like I am overthinking how I am going to document our travels, having a structure means that I can codify items and attach them to file names and links, even if I haven’t created the content yet. It allows me to create a filing system made up of letters and numbers to describe an Epic, a Story within that epic and then a sequence number and also media type.
In SMOOTHIES I have a numbering system consisting of the last two numbers of the year the month represented as an alphabetical code there are only 12 months in a year so A to L and finally the episode number for that month which is a number between one and 5 given that there are a maximum of five Fridays in a month. This gives me 4 character code which provides uniqueness and a very quick way to identify when an episode was recorded.
Having a similar system for collecting assets related to travel means that I don’t even have to think about the naming convention for files because I can just apply one based upon epic number story number what type of asset it is and create that code even before I’ve created the asset.
- Epic – 1-8 (I use letters for epics to differentiate them from stories) – I only use a single character because I think any more than 10 epics is too much.
- Story – 01-99 (I use numbers and in a 240 day journey of 8 epics, I won’t write 99 stories for even the longest epic) – I use the two characters though, so I start with 01, not 1.
- Asset type – audio, video, image, website URL, document – these letters help me create anchor codes to link my thumbnails to from the thumbnail enhanced map. A,V,I,W,D works for me and it is just a helper if I am looking for the asset. I normally stored videos in a certain location because of their size and images live in Lightroom which has a different folder structure.
- Author – The story (in a blog, vlog or podcast) is attributed to an author so I don’t need a code for that
- Date – Not needed as other data related to the story – photos and videos will have date created stamped in their metadata.
Let’s use the following image that has been enabled with links using the SVG coding construct. If you hover over a thumbnail, you will see a website address with a hashtag at the end and a code. That hashtag is what is known as a html anchor and allows you to create a destination placeholder in any allocation in a webpage.. so my coding system can also be used to create destination anchors in a webpage that my thumbnails can link to. In reality, the image thumbnails link to Adobe Portfolio webpages that are in fact albums I have created from my Lightroom photographs. More on that later. I have taken the code segment directly from xsymetrix site and pasted it in here as custom HTML and it just works. For the purpose of keeping you on this webpage, I will pop up the site in a new window, but that is the only change I needed to make.
I know this all sounds very convoluted but with this structure in place it allows me to take my cameras which in my case are an iPhone plus Gopro cameras, capture images and video for a day upload that to either my laptop and or Lightroom in the cloud where I can then select the best photographs for that day while not throwing away any of the other photographs and provide a subset of the day’s adventures. If I then want to write a diary of the day’s events which may then be transformed into a blog I can do that knowing that I have structured access to the multimedia assets from the day’s adventures.
For those of you who follow on our adventures you will be able to dissect the stories and links that I share to see how I have applied this methodology to creating my blog of this incredible journey that we are about to embark upon.
The following headings will be discussed in detail in later blog posts, but here I wanted to include a basic link to the software, hardware, software subscriptions and web app favourites. As I deliver weekly edtech episodes to teachers in a show called…
“SMOOTHIES” = Short Multimodal Online Opportunities To Help Interested Educators Succeed,
…many topics cover the very items I list below and by using them in real life while on the road, I accumulate a series of best practice learnings to share with everybody, not just teachers on how to use these communication tools.
Software
- Snagit (capturing of maps and placement of empty rectangles and pointers)
- Adobe Express (Pasting of thumbnails from Lightroom photo albums and addition of text and numbers)
- Lightroom and Portfolio (Captures, stores photos into albums, allows edits and albums are shared with the integrated Portfolio website)
- Premiere Pro – For video editing / movie making (part of Adobe Creative Cloud)
- Firefly – Generative AI pictures – mainly where I want a graphic that explains a concept and don’t have my own image
- WordPress – The website builder I use for my websites
- Onenote, Word, Excel, Dictation Software
- There are more… but you know the rule of 7 🙂
Hardware
- iPhone
- Windows 11 laptop – Dell XPS 13
- 2 GoPro – GoPro 11 and Gopro 13
- 2 External SSD Harddrives
Storage – Cloud – subscriptions
- Adobe 1 TB storage
- icloud 2 TB
- M365 family subscription
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- YouTube
- Hostm web hosting account
Web Favourites
- Rome2Rio
- Booking.com
- Many more…
I use these items and effectively endorse them, but there is no paid endorsement or affiliate links associated with any of my blogs. Probably more fool me, but you’ll at least know that these things are on the list because I use them. I also need to add that I use some of these items out of habit and comfort. A good example is that Nikon and Canon are neck and neck in the digital camera stakes. I have a Nikon and that is primarily because I have always had a Nikon. If I was asked to choose, I would need to say that my response is biased through my personal usage history and not a scientific comparison of like for like cameras. So when you read these posts, consider what I use the tools for and then if the type of tool makes sense for your particular use case, then do a like for like comparison on brands with similar products so you can make an informed decision.