CIA World Factbook

In thinking about what site I should choose to review for this blog, I decided on what might be termed (as the expression goes) "an oldie but a goodie."

It's called the CIA World Factbook, and I had my first encounter with this magnificent site while I was a senior in high school. I was taking Modern World History and we used it for a short, introductory exercise. The CIA also hosts a wide variety of other extremely informative sub-sections on its website--World Leaders, Maps and Publications, Additional Publications, etc. The user can see regional maps, look at flags of the world, browse a Did You Know? section, and make country comparisons.

In its barest form, the World Factbook essentially lets you to bring up any country or region in the world and immediately access a broad range of statistical data related to that country or region, as well as qualitative information related to the development and makeup of the nation (history, politics, culture, geography, etc). When I say statistical data, I mean very minute details, such as the number of paved and unpaved airport runways, miles of telephone lines, internet users, and other seemingly insignificant (but interesting!) things. However, from a tactical standpoint, all of those facts could coalesce into something important for our government if a serious situation arose. To add a little more fun into the mix, countries are ranked in many categories, and users can bring up comparative lists to search for trends in the data.

When I was a high school student, I believe we used this website to make comparisons in specific areas, such as GINI coefficients, natural resources, population growth rates, ethnic groups, religions, and languages. These facts painted a picture of the countries we were examining and provided a background for further investigation into some of the issues they were facing, or understanding why one country might be doing very well in one area but another country was having problems. (For instance, a country with multiple ethnic groups, languages, and religions might be experiencing more social unrest or revolution than a neighboring country with less diversity.)

Although there is no specific link for teachers, I think the lesson possibilities are endless with this site--not only in terms of a particular content concentration, but the academic level of it as well. A variety of data is available and can be flexibly used to accommodate a complicated high school project in comparative politics, or a simple middle school one in world geography. Teachers could launch an historical investigation based on the information found in the Factbook, or design multiple geography lessons from the maps, flags, and information found on the site. It could be part of a webquest, or a project on a certain country. The site could be used to build on historical knowledge that students already have, too. For example, in one of my classes, we spent a week or so on the history of the Middle East, focusing slightly on conflicts in the the region. When we reached the current circumstances in the area, our teacher split us into groups and gave us the ethnic, language, and religious makeup of the Middle East on one handout, as well as a map showing where various natural resource deposits were located. He then told us to get busy and decide how we were going to re-draw the boundaries of the Middle East, keeping in mind its history and all of the other factors (which can be found on the Factbook). It ended up being one of the best exercises I was ever given as a student.

I've discovered that I'm prone to the "go explore what interests you" type of approach as a teacher, so I prefer sort of the more open-ended resources--sites and media that I can tweak and tinker with and let students get out of them what they want. I know this approach doesn't work well with some students, but I wanted to be honest and say that because it influenced my choice of this website for the blog.