69 Welcome
Welcome!
Welcome to Regional Geography! My name is Peter Turner, and I will be your instructor on what I trust will be a stimulating and rewarding journey around this great planet of ours.
I have taught this course hundreds of times in the traditional lecture style, and many times in this new and exciting online format. I think together we can make for a successful experience. My background is that I have been teaching for over 40 years and have degrees in both Economics and Geography. I believe my biggest strength is that I have been fortunate enough to travel virtually all over the world, and have lived and worked in Australia, New Zealand, England, and South Africa. I hope that my experiences will be helpful to you.
When I got my Master’s Degree in Geography, a friend of mine sent me a box of crayons. Sadly, many people conclude that Geography is all and only about coloring maps and learning the six rivers of France; nothing could be farther from the truth. Geography is about the way people live and how they manage to develop given the realities of the physical environment. I hope that after this course you will be better understand that Geography is essential in today’s complex interdependent world.
We are going to use an excellent online (free) text. The text is integral to this course, so I encourage you to take some time to get familiar with the features in the book. You will notice a tremendous amount of fact and data in many of the chapters. Obviously you will not be required to memorize and remember so many facts. This book will be a reference mainly.
For each of the Modules in our course, I will present a mini lecture, more or less an overview of the unit. In each module, you will be asked to answer a discussion question and respond to other students’ answers. You will also be asked to submit a short essay (or answers to chapter questions) and complete web exercises in each module. The information for your answers and your essays will come from the text and/or sources available on the World Wide Web. There will also be rather challenging Module Exams- more on those later.
I suggest you carefully read the other documents in this section for more details.
Peter Turner
“Original document by Peter Turner licensed CC BY”