Assessing Place Location Knowledge Using a Virtual Globe

Advances in the Google Earth virtual globe and the concomitant Keyhole Markup Language (KML) are providing educators with a convenient platform to cultivate and assess one’s place location knowledge (PLK). This article presents a general framework and associated implementation methods for the online testing of PLK using Google Earth. The proposed framework and associated implementations can be easily exported to other applications that help assess geographic knowledge, engaging users with content from the physical environment and human systems at both local and global scales in a 3-D virtual-globe environment.