Rural Landscape and Small Town News Assignments

Choosing a Location and Defining a Study Region
For this assignment and subsequent assignments you will need to choose a rural place to study. It could be the region surrounding a small town, rural county or rural region. If you choose a town, you'll need to expand your study area to include the surrounding region. In states like Indiana, the county is an ideal regional unit of study. In places like Colorado, with larger counties, you'll need to define your area as a portion of the county. You'll need to have a study region that is large enough to find information and that includes multiple places of interest. It shouldn't be so large that your research task is made impossible. Make sure that you can find a local source of news online or otherwise and that you have a way to gather information about this place. This will be the region you will research for the rest of the semester so choose well. Include the name of your region in the title for the Rural Landscape assignment.

Small Town News Assignment
Throughout the semester you will need to regularly read the news from the place you have adopted. If the town doesn't have its own newspaper it may be served by a regional one. On selected Fridays you will have the opportunity to share news with your classmates, especially news related to the topics discussed in the course. You will need to present news at least twice. If you would like to you can use Facebook, a blog or other online means to keep track of and share your news if you are using an online source (and we can look at it on the screen). No written assignment is necessary here.

Rural Landscape (25 points)

1. Use Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/), Google Earth or another air photo or satellite imagery web site to examine your region from above. The overall goal of this assignment is to begin to understand significant features of rural landscapes as well as spatial patterns characteristic of rural landscapes.
2. Then write a 3-5 page analysis of the rural landscape. Your analysis should state individual observations and then describe their significance.
3. If you wish you may include screen shots in an appendix. Please place the images at the end of your text and give each image a figure number (Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.). Be sure that you reference the figure numbers with in the text, (Figure 1) for example.
4. Follow the guidelines for written work that I forgot to include in the syllabus (Can you believe I didn't manage to fit it in somewhere in those nine pages?! I knew it was too short). I've included them below.

Standards and Criteria for Grading
An excellent report will:

• Help the reader learn about some significant features of rural landscapes and understand some basic rural spatial patterns.
• Discuss important observations and include discussion of their significance.
• Do a good job of describing what you have observed. Descriptions will be specific and allow the reader to picture what is being observed.
• Discuss the significance of observations.
• Be 3-5 pages in length (excluding any appendices) and follow standards for written work for the course.

Questions to Think about as you Make Your Observations
(PLEASE don't simply answer these questions one by one in your paper. These are just meant to get you thinking.)

• What kind of infrastructure do you see? What transportation infrastructure is present? Do you see any telecommunications infrastructure? Electrical distribution infrastructure? Water control infrastructure? (ditches, dams, reservoirs).
• What evidence of agriculture do you see? What type of agriculture is it? How do you know? What infrastructure do you see that supports agriculture? What shapes do the fields take on? How are the shapes determined? Are there different kinds of farms? Can you spot large animal agriculture processing facilities?
• Do you see any evidence of resource extraction? (mining, forestry, etc.)
• What evidence of manufacturing do you see? Can you find factories? Where are they located?
• What evidence of service industries do you see? Where are they located?
• What evidence of recreational activities do you see? What kind? Where?
• What kinds of residential development is present? How is it arranged on the landscape? Where? What kinds of landscape features seem to "attract housing"? Are the houses large? Small? do the people living in houses or housing developments work? Where do you think they shop?
• How do patterns of housing, agriculture, business, and recreation interrelate?
• How does the pattern of landscape features change as you get closer to a town or city?
• Are there any interesting landscape features that you have difficulty identifying?
• What other generalizations can you make about this area looking at it from air photos?

Standards for Written Work in The Country and the City
Your written work (the analytical essays and the final paper, etc.) should conform to the following standards:

• Papers should be typed, double spaced with one inch margins, using a Times Roman or other similar serif font. Courier style fonts are not to be used). Papers should be stapled in the upper left hand corner. Plastic report covers should not be used.
• Papers should cite sources and use the author date style of referencing commonly used in the discipline of geography. See a copy of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers for examples.
• Research papers should make use of sources from the World Wide Web only when the source is a government agency or other reliable institution, and online version of a print resource (i.e. article databases), or when it is the online source itself that is the subject of the research. See your professor concerning the appropriateness of using sources from the Web. You should not use Wikipedia or other online encyclopedic references in a college level paper.
• Where appropriate use section headings.
• Papers should be free of mechanical and grammatical errors.
• Papers should conform to the requirements of the specific assignments (given above).