Contech

As the semester (or trimester) gets under way for most academics in the U.S., faculty are dusting off lectures and preparing their lectures.   The “chalk and talk” lecture format is, of course, still popular.  Yet increasingly universities are opening up the classroom to those outside the enrolled student population and posting digital videos of faculty lectures online.   I’m sure there are more, but here’s a beginning list of resources (from OpenCulture):

Spotlighted Collections

• University of California – Berkeley
  • Arguably the most substantive YouTube collection out there. Features a large number of free courses, plus numerous lectures given by important figures.
• Indian Institute of Technology/Indian Institute of Science
  • Presented by the leading technology institutes in India, this collection features more than 50 free courses. Obviously has a strong technology/engineering bent.
• MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
  • Makes available many of the videos produced as part of MIT’s leading OpenCourseWare initiative.
• Stanford University
  • Newly launched, the collection already features a couple hundred videos, including several free courses.
• UChannel (Princeton)
  • Spearheaded by Princeton, this collection aggregates quality videos coming from a consortium of major universities.

Other University Collections

• Auburn University
  • Hard to separate the intellectual substance from videos that have a more promotional & internal bent. But some of the former is there to be found.
• Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School
  • The videos hosted here look at how the digital world and the law intersect.
• Carnegie Mellon
  • Among other things, this collection features the highly popular video: Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.
• Duke University
  • Individual videos explore the research coming out of one of America’s leading universities.
• Duke’s Fuqua School of Business
  • Similar to Duke’s main collection, but focused on business.
• EGS (The European Graduate School)
  • This European collection features important, contemporary theorists, philosophers, and filmmakers.
• Harvard’s Bok Center
  • A small collection focused on pedagogy.
• Old Dominion
  • A little bit of a hodgepodge but there’s some interesting items in the mix.
• Ohio State
  • So far not an overwhelming use of the medium.
• Oxford University – Saïd Business School
  • Rather internally focused. Not much in the way of educational content per se. But let’s keep our fingers crossed that it eventually offers more.
• Purdue University
  • Again something of a hodgepodge. Wheat and chaff.
• Sonoma State
  • A more intellectually robust collection that features a fair amount of notable lectures.
• The Open University
  • The Open University (OU) is the United Kingdom’s only university dedicated to distance learning.
• Tulane University
  • You can access some of the speeches by esteemed guest speakers here.
• University of Arizona
  • You can sort through a good number of talks here.
• University of California TV
  • UCTV pulls together videos from the campuses, national laboratories, and affiliated institutions of the University of California.
• University of Chicago Press
  • Though still modest in size, the collection features some interesting items.
• University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
  • The collection is substantive on the whole. You will need to sift through the videos to find ones of interest.
• UCSF Memory & Aging Channel
  • UCSF, one of the leading medical schools in the US, features videos that will “educate patients, caregivers and health professionals about the various forms of neurodegenerative diseases.” The diseases covered here include Alzheimer’s, Frontotemporal dementia and Creutzfelt-Jakob
• USC (University of Southern California)
  • Get lectures here, and arts content here.
• Vanderbilt University
  • An eclectic mix.

This sort of opening up of higher education is, as John Seely Brown points out,  part of a larger Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, that began in 2001 when the William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly funded MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them.   Just another sign that we’re in the midst of a sea change in higher education.

A news item caught my attention about the recent Hurricane Gustav and blogging, including micro-blogging such as Twitter.  James Jenaga, writing for the Chicago Tribune, reports this:

The fearful weather reports about Hurricane Gustav did not persuade Sheila Moragas to leave Old Jefferson, a suburb just west of New Orleans. It was the 38-year-old mother’s dwindling ranks of online friends on the micro-blogging network Twitter.

One by one, Twitterers with nicknames like “HumidCity,” “DomesticKitty” and “NOLADawn” pulled up stakes Sunday and left south Louisiana, live-blogging the building drama through text messages on their laptops, home computers and cell phones.

“It’s been helpful,” Moragas said. “It’s less hyperbole, more reliable. There’s also a lot of people panicking, but it’s neighborly. It feels like you’re talking to your next-door neighbors and trying to say, ‘What’s the best thing to do?’ ”

At noon Sunday, Moragas, known as “NOLAnotes” to her followers on Twitter, decided the wisest option was to leave, abandoning the New Orleans area in advance of a massive hurricane for the second time in three years.

This story makes me wonder how differently disasters such as Heat Wave, and the pattern of humans coping with disasters, might be in the future.

Do you Twitter?   Twitter is a microblogging software that allows you to post short updates, just 140 characters, in answer to the question: What are you doing?  The updates that people add to Twitter are called “tweets.”  You can choose to “follow” people, that is read their tweets.  And, people can choose to “follow” you, or read your updates.

I know, I know.  Another web application to update, what a pain.   I thought so at first, too.  But Twitter continues to surprise me in its usefulness.   I follow a range of people from Barack Obama to friends to people I don’t know offline but who post really interesting updates.   The most useful tweets are those that include links to other websites, so it’s one of the main ways I stay informed about breaking news these days.

And, I predict that Twitter is going to have increasing significance as a tool in sociological research.   Just last week, for example, I posted a short announcement about a new research project I’m doing for which I need a very specific set of respondents: feminist bloggers.  So, I posted an update on Twitter that I was looking for (at least) forty feminist bloggers to interview.     A feminist blogger I follow on Twitter re-posted, or “retweeted,” my call to her network of followers, then posted it on her blog.

A week later I have responses to my quick online survey from twenty feminist bloggers and follow-up (face-to-face and phone) interviews scheduled with 15 of those.   That’s nearly half my sample in a week.   Now, I’m considering revising the total sample size upward.

It’s not a representative sample, to be sure, but it is a solid “snowball” sample and a perfectly fine sampling strategy for qualitative research.    Twitter as sampling strategy simply means that the “old” way of snowball sampling, by asking respondents and key informants to recommend people, is now being mediated – and speeded up – through online networks.     This morning, I’m off for my first in person, face-to-face qualitative interview for this research project.   All arranged via the “snowball” sampling strategy for the digital era: Twitter.

Sarah Lai Stirland writing for Wired magazine calls this Democratic Convention the “techiest” (her term) convention ever.   That’s not hard to believe as lots of people bypass the talking-head-pundits on the broadcast networks and seeking out their own streaming video of the convention (as Jon described yesterday), or looking for outside-the-mainstream commentary from their favorite bloggers at the convention.    All this makes me think about Todd Gitlin’s famous book, The Whole World is Watching (1983), about the role of the mass media in the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  But, the world has changed since 1968…. and, it has even changed since he first published the book in 1983.     Gitlin argues that mass media news coverage is a form of anti-democratic social management, an analysis he extends to mass media coverage of other movements.    In the preface to the new edtion of the book (2003), Gitlin makes only one reference to how the Internet has changed things, writing:

“Meanwhile, the Internet affords abundant possibilities for access to smaller markets… rendering the hold of big media somewhat more tenuous than before.”

This seems to understate the case considerably.     Other scholars like Doug Kellner and David Perlmutter, argue for a much more profound impact of bloggers on the political landscape than Gitlin seems to suggest.  For example, in Perlmutter’s recent book,  Blog Wars, he argues that blogs are no longer fringe elements of the communications landscape and have, as of 2008, gone mainstream. He goes on to assert that blogs represent a technological innovation that is, in general terms, a good thing for democracy.  While it’s overreaching to suggest that the “whole world” is connecting to the Internet (or even if they were that they’d be connecting to learn more about the DNC), but there is a fundamental shift going on in how big political events are covered by mass media.  And that shift is happening because of bloggers, from the bottom up, grassroots style.   We’re still “way before the beginning,” or, as Beer and Burrows (2007) put it:  “before sociologists have begun to get a handle on the phenomena” of blogging.    Sounds like a great dissertation topic for an emerging sociologist.

In his classic sociological article, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” (American Journal of Sociology 1973) Mark Granovetter demonstrates how social activity influences labor markets. In this and other work (including a follow up article in Sociological Theory in 1985 and his book, Getting a Job, from University of Chicago Press, 1995), Granovetter systematically explores how 282 men in the U.S. found their jobs.  His work has not only provides evidence for the truism that “it’s not what you know but who you know,” it also illustrates how social activity and labor markets overlap and interact with one another.    Some of that is changing. 

Today, connections such as the “weak ties” Granovetter identified still matter.  Only now, these weak ties are mediate through the Internet, and in particular, through social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, and the much more buttoned-down LinkedIn.  These websites are increasingly platforms from which people network for job leads and forge professional contacts, Stephanie Rosenbloom notes in a recent piece in the New York Times.    In that article, Rosenbloom cites several examples of people who found their current jobs via a social networking site, and this trend is coming to higher education hiring as well.   Rosenbloom quotes Marilyn Mackes, the executive director of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, about their 2008  survey of employers which found that whereas in the past they used social-networking sites “to check profiles of potential hires,” said  today “more than half will use the sites to network with potential candidates.”

While one blog refers to Rosenbloom’s article as “modernizing Granovetter’s hypothesis,” it doesn’t quite rise to that level of analysis in my view.  There are still lots of questions about how we should think about the “strength of weak ties” in the digital era.   For someone like me who’s interested in social inequality, there are lots of questions that remain about how these new kinds of internetworked ties help ameliorate or reinforce old forms of inequality like gender and race?  A just-released international study suggested that women in the workplace across several countries are less likely to promote themselves and network than their male counterparts.   Perhaps the Internet open up new opportunities for self-promotion and career advancement for women.   Or, perhaps not.  The point is this:  how people look for and find jobs, and how employers look for and hire new employees, is shifting.  And, we need some sociological insights to explain this shifting terrain.

At the recent ASA meetings in Boston, I spoke with several colleagues about some of the interesting stuff going on in sociology and social media/digital media/Internet technology/fill-in-your-favorite-term here. In those conversations, I heard a familiar refrain. One colleague remarked in reference to a presentation I’d done recently on using technology in the classroom, “I wish I didn’t even know about all that. It’s all too much!” Another colleague lamented, “I have no time to learn about the Internet. I work 80 weeks as it is, and I have a family!”

I can sympathize. For those of us working under the usual constraints of a publish-or-perish academic career, multiplied by the demands of a (family) or personal life beyond academia, keeping up with the latest developments in technology can seem like a daunting – and unnecessary – task. I’ll write more about what I see as the “necessity” of it some other time, but for now, I just want to talk about how it might be less daunting.

Some of the new technology out there can make keeping up with the rest of the information possible. Here’s one tool, “RSS,” explained in “plain english” along with some handy visual aids (about 3 minutes from the folks at CommonCraft):

Stanley Aronowitz has suggested that sociology may be experiencing a resurgence of interest in the work of C. Wright Mills, a veritable Mills Revival. I think this is a good thing for sociology. I confess to having a keen fascination with C. Wright Mills (image from: C.WrightMills.org). I, like so many sociologists, came to the discipline through Mills’ notion of the sociological imagination, that is a grasp of the intersection of biography and history, between private trouble and public issues. In part, I identify with him because we shared a similar geographic trajectory as Mills and I are both Texas-born and raised sociologists who ended up in New York. I don’t, as Mills famously did, ride a motorcycle (though my girlfriend does).

While most of us who have taught an introductory sociology class have drawn on the concept of the sociological imagination, what endures for many sociologists about Mills’ work is his appendix to that work, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” If you can read it while translating every “he” to “she” (or a gender neutral pronoun), then it can be a compelling and relevant text for what we do as sociologists. I was just re-reading it and wondered how Mills, were he alive today, might update it for the digital age. Kiernan Healy has done a nice job of this in his post “On Wasting One’s Time,” in which he pulls an excerpt of Mills’ appendix and strategically inserts the word “blog,” for Mills’ use of the term “file.” The notion of “playfulness” that Mills writes about, the arranging, re-arranging of the file, contrasting extremes and opposites of one concept, the search for comparative examples, are all quantum leaps easier in the digital era. For someone who loves knowledge, the Internet can seem like a vast playground of searching and knowing and exploring. Mills, as Todd Gitlin points out, was also a gifted – if solitary – political radical. And, in that regard, I have no doubt that were Mills alive today, he’d have his own blog.

There are lots of other bits in Mills’ appendix that are worth revisiting in the digital age, and I’ll be exploring some more of those here in days to come.

I’m happy to be blogging here and I want to thank Jon Smajda, Chris Uggen, and the other folks at Contexts, for the invitation. I’ll be back with a more substantive post soon, but assume most readers don’t know me so I thought I’d offer a brief intro.

I started thinking about technology in my research and teaching in 1996-1997. The timing of this new thinking was not coincidental. That was also the same year that Chris Toulouse (my co-conspirator and fellow blogger here) and I started teaching together at a suburban Long Island university. Chris shared with me his enthusiasm for using computers in the classroom and quickly convinced me of the importance of cyberspace for sociologists interested in understanding society in the 21st century. Chris and I both lived in Brooklyn at that time, so we often commuted together on the Long Island Railroad (LIRR). And, it was on those LIRR journeys that Chris and I talked for hours about the way that sociology as a field of study and our jobs as professors in the classroom were going to change because of the Internet.

In about 2001, Chris and I together approached some people within the ASA administration about the tsunami-like changes that were soon to transform the discipline. Our suggestions were met with politely blank stares. At the same time, some of our colleagues were discouraging us from using technology in the classroom or from focusing on it in our research, because after all, “the Internet is a fad.”

Fortunately, lots of things have changed since those days. Chris and I are friends now more than colleagues, since we’ve both moved on to other institutions; and, most people realize that the Internet is something more than a fad. And, most delightfully, the ASA has begun to wrestle with the implications of digital technologies for the discipline. Yet, I think that sociologists are still just beginning to ponder what the Internet might mean for our usual practices of research and teaching. This is where Chris and I come in. We’re still having those long conversations about technology and how it is transforming sociological research and teaching. At this point, we’ve each also had more than ten years of experience doing research and teaching with, about and through the Internet, and we’ll draw on that background for our writing here. Our plan is to update this blog five days a week, Monday-Friday mostly. I’ll focus on research, methods, and how the way we think about society is changing because of the Internet and “social media” more broadly. Chris will focus primarily on the classroom and how these technologies are changing how we think of the pedagogical side of our jobs. Of course, Chris has things to say about research, and I have a good deal to say about teaching, but that’s the general plan. That said, we recognize that the distinction between “research” and “teaching” is often a false one, so feel free to regard those categories as heuristic devices.

So, again I’m happy to be here, and look forward to this new blogging venture as a way of expanding the conversation to include new friends and colleagues.