In case this doesn’t look familiar, this is the internal working of Blackboard, which increasingly is required for instructional use at colleges. Well that and WebCT, which I’ve also used and like a little better*. You can do a lot of things with Blackboard: so many things, in fact, that last summer I filled out [...]
I’m showing these Google videos in my class today, and thought they were blog-worthy. Topic? Standardization, the case of the Model T, and the assembly line. A fun thing to do is to compare the specialization of tasks between the Dodge commercial and the Wii assembly line, then ask, Has 50 years made any difference [...]
You might say I’m a tourist of the sociology of food. I don’t live there, but I like passing through. So when I ran across this interview (via jt) on NPR’s Marketplace with Barry Glassner, I was intrigued. Especially interesting was the tag line: it’s not “You are what you eat,” it’s “You eat what [...]
A word to all of you who get here by Googling “essays on the sociological imagination C. Wright Mills” and then find this page. Just remember to cite me in your paper. I think the proper citation for a blog is: Lastname, Firstname, I. “Title of individual blog entry.” [Weblog entry.] Name of Weblog. Sponsoring [...]
RateMyProfessors just crossed the line. I know I am breaking the unwritten rule by mentioning this website in public. RMP is supposed to be the secret place that students go to rag on their profs. But now RMP is doing the unspeakable. Ok, so the website has it’s problems. Mainly, the they use the poorest [...]
Steven Pastis Pearls Before Swine. Click on the crocs to make bigger. School starts this week. Hopefully these links won’t bore you as much as my lectures might. Sociologists on Blogging. Introspective thoughts on blogging by sozlog, a German bilingual sociology blog who calls for more sociology blogs. This after Teppo at orgtheory.net adds a [...]
Since school is starting up next week, I thought I’d post a favorite classroom assignment of mine, especially in introductory classes. It’s a comparative community demographic assignment, good for thinking about your own location in the spectrum of social inequality. American FactFinder can be found at the U.S. Census website, and is used by many [...]
For the summer class I’m co-teaching, Cities and Citizens, students did an ethnography of a Chicago mural. The assignment: find a public mural (we used Mary Gray’s Guide to Chicago’s Murals), observe human interaction around it for 30 minutes, and turn in a one-to-two page report. Mary Gray featured 181 murals in her book, but [...]
This one needs your comment. My friend Kim is teaching Mass Media and Popular Culture this summer, and wants to use music to teach sociology. The specific task is to identify both positive and negative images (physical yes, but also social images) of men and women through song. I’m not a music guy, so I [...]
