We’ve been big on videos lately, but what can we say: online video is booming.

You may be familiar with TED: a conference about Technology, Entertainment and Design, though really there are talks on just about every topic. The best part: the talks are all online for free.

Most of the videos are around 20 minutes, so they’re perfect for watching in class or as assignments. Here are just two that I’ve watched recently as examples:

First, here’s Barry Schwartz on the decline of “wisdom.” It’s a bit of a rant near the end (in my opinion), but the first half provides an interesting critique of our modern faith in rationality and incentives and is great to compliment lectures on either bureaucracy or on rational choice:

Second, here’s a talk by Hans Rosling on “Third-world myths,” which is worth watching just for the captivating display of data alone. It’s great for a discussion of globalization but also, because the graphics are so good, for courses on research methods and data presentation. You can also see more of these graphics at gapminder.org:

Many sociology instructors (especially at the college-level) are required to have students complete formal evaluations of their teaching and course structure, but these one-size-fits-all evaluation templates don’t always relay valuable information back to instructors. For that reason, some instructors elect to use additional evaluations to learn more about what their students thought of the class.

The University of Akron’s Center for Teaching and Learning has a great template that instructors can give to student to have them evaluate the course in greater detail. The template, available for download in this post, includes questions about the student’s learning style and experience, in addition to more conventional questions about the course and instructor.

Have you developed any especially effective evaluation strategies? Comment below and get the discussion going!

Many instructors find that showing movies or even short clips from documentaries or news programs can help keep students engaged and excited about their course content. YouTube is a great resource for short clips on a variety of topics, but can sometimes be hit-or-miss based on the volume of content on the site and relatively little quality control on specific topics.

I’ve found FRONTLINE, the public television program, to be a reliable source for great clips to show in class, plus, they now have an extensive collection of programs (both full and excerpted) available to view online. Frontline covers a variety of issues and often have additional commentary from producers and ‘fact sheets’ or ‘FAQs’ that you could print off and use as handouts during class.

The FRONTLINE episodes are also categorized so that you can easily find appropriate clips for whatever issue you are discussing in class. Some of my recent favorites:

• Sick Around the World and Sick Around America — about healthcare systems around the world, and in the U.S.

• Growing Up Online — about the latest generation growing up on/with the internet

• When Kids Get Life — about children in the U.S. receiving life sentences for murder, and the juvenile justice system in America more generally
• Is WalMart Good for America? — about corporatization, labor practices, and business culture
• A Class Divided — about discrimination and racism in the U.S. — Frontline writes, “This is one of the most requested programs in FRONTLINE’s history. It is about an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. This is the story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives.”

Go to FRONTLINE’s website.

What videos have you found to be especially useful in your sociology courses?

Of course, all of our blogs make for great classroom material, but our newest blog, Graphic Sociology, is particularly good for teaching. It’s especially useful for courses on research methods and the presentation of data.

Graphic Sociology is run by Laura Norén, a PhD candidate in sociology at New York University. Laura’s research is on the impact of design on social behavior and she’s also co-founder of a web design company, so she’s a good person to listen to on this subject.

Each post pulls a particular graphic that tries to represent social data visually. Laura does a great job of pulling graphics from a wide range of sources on just about any topic imaginable. Some examples:

• Cigarette taxes and smoking rates
• Web browser market share over time
• Internal migration within the US

The great thing about Graphic Sociology is that the posts work on many levels. Undergraduates and non-sociologists can appreciate it because the information presented is fascinating and the discussion of how the graphics can lead and mislead readers makes for a good exercise in critical thinking. If you’re teaching a course on research methods, this blog is a great resource for classroom material.

For graduate students, sociologists or anyone else who has to present data as part of their job, the blog is a great place to learn what we’re doing wrong and to get ideas for how to present our data in new, more powerful ways. For example, you may not care about web browser market share, but you may be interested in the cool technique for representing data over time used in that graphic.

In the interest of maintaining a diversity of topics for instructors of sociology, I spent some time this week searching through syllabi for courses in the sociology of law. I came across one in particular that I thought offered a number of interesting readings and dealt with administrative issues and overall course structure quite well. The syllabus is designed for a course called ‘Sociology of Law and Legal Institutions‘ by Daniel John Steward of Oberlin College. The syllabus is available online. [Click here]

The course uses the following books, as well as additional online materials and journal articles outlined in the syllabus itself.

Balkin, Jack M. ed. 2002. What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Landmark Civil Rights Decision. New York, NY: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-9890-X.

Friedman, Lawrence M. 2004. Law in America: A Short History. New York, NY: The Modern Library. ISBN 0-8129-7285-6.

Sutton, John R. 2001. Law/Society: Origins, Interactions, and Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. ISBN 0-7619-8705-3.

Stewart articulates the following objectives for the course:

Law will be examined as an institutionalized field of contests over the rules of social life. We will open the semester with readings on the historical development of core institutions such as courts, codes, constitutions, criminals, and counsellors. With this common ground, we will then turn our attention to some of the questions and concerns that sociologists (and other law & society scholars) raise with respect to these institutions. For example: To what extent can we use changes in legal form to understand changes in social relations? How do some legal rules acquire legitimacy for members of a society—and why are other rules ignored or despised? Do legal rules (and their enforcers) inevitably serve powerful political or economic interests—or does law have some autonomy? How do legal institutions enable and constrain movements for social justice? We will consider this last question through a study of the history of racial segregation in schools and the legal and cultural significance of Brown v. Board of Education. Over the course of the semester, students will be expected to:

• Appreciate the challenge and complexity of living in accord with a rule of law.
• Cultivate their legal literacy by approaching legal rules and institutions from several perspectives, including those of legal professionals, active citizens, and social critics.
• Enhance their research and writing skills through the completion of a course notebook.

Indiana University has a fantastic web-based tutorial that outlines how to recognize plagiarism, and even includes an ‘identifying plagiarism’ quiz that provides writing samples and outlines the right and wrong way to cite primary or secondary source material.

The Basics:

• You use another person’s ideas, opinions, or theories.
• You use facts, statistics, graphics, drawings, music, etc., or any other type of information that does not comprise common knowledge.
• You use quotations from another person’s spoken or written word.
• You paraphrase another person’s spoken or written word.

Recommendations:

• Begin the writing process by stating your ideas; then go back to the author’s original work.
• Use quotation marks and credit the source (author) when you copy exact wording.
• Use your own words (paraphrase) instead of copying directly when possible.
• Even when you paraphrase another author’s writings, you must give credit to that author.
• If the form of citation and reference are not correct, the attribution to the original author is likely to be incomplete. Therefore, improper use of style can result in plagiarism. Get a style manual and use it.

Head to the tutorial page…

Identifying plagiarism — 10 items

Take the plagiarism test and print out a certificate…

Last week, I posted about using podcasts in the classroom. This week I want to share a few relatively new websites designed for sharing academic talks.

I got the idea from this post on TechCrunch about the website Academic Earth, which TechCrunch called “Hulu for Education.” If you aren’t familiar with Hulu, it’s a joint venture of NBC, Fox and several other media corporations that makes television shows and films available for free (with advertising) online. This isn’t a new idea, but Hulu’s been successful for being one of the first sites to do this that doesn’t suck: the interface is clean and simple, it’s easy to subscribe to the specific shows you want to watch, the advertisements aren’t distracting, the selection is pretty good, etc. Academic Earth does follows the Hulu model of being a nice, clean, searchable aggregator for academic lectures and courses that you can subscribe to and watch in order. (Now as to whether or not the lectures are as entertaining as, say, The Simpsons on Hulu, I won’t say.)

On Academic Earth, you can find a large variety of lectures and complete courses. From Paul Bloom’s Intro to Psychology course to Benjamin Polack’s Game Theory course. You can even embed videos. For example, here’s Bloom’s lecture on social psychology:

What you won’t find—yet—are any sociology courses! So get on it, sociologists! Despite the relative dearth of “sociologists,” there’s much sociological content and many of these lectures will be appropriate for use in classes we teach. (Or even just an accessible way for us to learn a little more about other fields ourselves!)

Academic Earth isn’t the only site like this: also check out BigThink and Fora.tv. Of course, “iTunes U” and the iTunes podcasting section has lots of useful stuff as well.

Update: …and just two days later, YouTube joins the crowd with YouTube edu. (via ThickCulture)

As I was looking through some back issues of Teaching Sociology (the ASA journal dedicated to instruction and pedagogy), I was struck by an article published last summer about the use of ‘non-traditional texts’ for undergraduate sociology classes. The piece was especially interesting to me as I was drawn to the discipline through an intro course organized around novels and short stories.

The article, by Ursula Castellano, Joseph Deangelis, and Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, entitled ‘Cultivating a Sociological Perspective using Nontraditional Texts’ was published in Teaching Sociology, Vol. 36, 2008 (July: 240-253).

The authors argue that “novels, mysteries and nonfiction books can provide undergraduate students with an accessible and exciting place to explore sociological concepts. Using storytelling as a pedagogical tool, we teach students key theoretical ideas by analyzing the books in their specific socio-cultural contexts.”

Castellano and co-authors provide concrete strategies for using these types of readings in undergraduate sociology courses to reach a number of student learning goals, including “increasing engagement, enhancing conceptual understanding and improving analytic ability.”

The article even provides sample assignments and exam questions!

“Teaching still remains the key interest of most faculty. In surveys in 1969, 1975, and 1989, the Carnegie Foundation asked faculty whether their interests were primarily in teaching or research. Roughly the same question was asked by the Higher Education Research Institute in 1996. Over nearly thirty years, the proportion of faculty responding affirmatively to teaching remained an astounding seven out of ten.”

– Arthur Levine, How the Academic Profession is Changing

Is a recording of a lecture a substitute for the real thing? A new study by psychologist Dani McKinney suggests that the answer may be “Yes.” (via New Scientist).

In fact, a podcast of a lecture may be better. Students watching a podcast can pause and rewind through missed points, they can pick their strongest time of the day to focus, and they can wear headphones to tune out distractions.

Just as students can stumble into a lecture hall and nap in the back row, simply listening to a podcast isn’t as important as how the students use the podcast: students who listened to the podcast one or more times and took notes while listening actually scored better on the test than students attending the lecture.

All the usual disclaimers apply: this was just one study of only 64 students, in one lecture, with one test. However, it does encourage us to take a closer look at podcasts as a powerful tool for teaching.

about podcasts

Podcasts are like radio or television shows you can download to your computer and listen to or watch wherever and whenever you want, on your computer or on a portable player such as an iPod. All you need to start podcasting is a podcasting client, such as iTunes.

contexts has a podcast!

If you want to hear an example, I’ll shamelessly plug our very own Contexts Podcast. We release episodes every other week and each episode features an interview with leading scholars—frequently authors from our magazine—and discussions of our favorite discoveries. Each episode is about 20-25 minutes long and are great to listen to on your daily commute or even to assign to your students to compliment your own course material.

On our podcast homepage we have links to many other podcasts listed in the sidebar that you may find interesting. If you find other good ones: let us know & we can recommend those too!

teaching with podcasts

But this post started with a study of podcasting lectures themselves, not just using them as supplementary course material. But podcasting your own lecture isn’t that hard, and some sociologists are doing it already, such as Gianpaolo Baiocchi’s Sociology of Race Relations (iTunes link), and Tina Fetner’s Intro to Sociology (iTunes Link).

If your university participates in iTunes U (for example, our home, The University of Minnesota, does), then it’s easy to get your podcast put online where others can find it. With the rise in online distance education, universities are increasingly well-equipped to handle this sort of thing, so ask around on your campus. Hopefully, you’ll find IT support people excited you’re trying something new & willing to help. (I know we benefited greatly from help from our college’s IT unit when we got started.)

Remember the study’s findings though! Encourage your students to listen to each lecture twice, or at least go back to the parts they struggled with later. Also, the students who did the best had printouts of slides to follow along with as well. And they still took notes, even though they weren’t in the physical class room.