There has recently been a lively discussion on the CITASA (Communication and Information Technology section of the American Sociological Association) listserv about using blogs for teaching college-level sociology. The discussion contained a lot of practical advice as well as pedagogical insight. I started a summary of the conversation and asked those who had been a part of it to collaborate on the summary via google docs. Below is a snippet of what we came up with and a link to the whole document, which includes drawbacks, tips, and links to further information.
Why Use Blogs in the Classroom?
- Blogs empower students to take ownership over course material and find their own voice as they express key concepts and ideas
- Blogging, like ethnography, is an opportunity for students to practice the skill of communicating in public.
- Blogs are of increasing significance in the production and dissemination of information and all students can benefit from gaining literacy in the use and creation of blogs
- Creating public content can help students think more critically about how information is produced and disseminated and what qualifies as a reliable source
- Creating public content can help students who are good at critique become better at constructive practice
To continue reading, click here…
If you want to be added to the ongoing conversation, email me at sargent at virginia dot edu and I’ll add you as a collaborator.
“Nakashi”: Typhoon Relief Benefit
To raise funds towards typhoon relief efforts in Taiwan, local food and performing artisans will join forces with Taiwanese artists for an evening of art, sound, live music and dance. The event will feature an one-night-only exhibit of visual and sound art installation works by Taiwan-based artists responding to the typhoon.
Dzian! will present a live set of Nakashi-inspired surf and garage rock music and dance evoking Taiwanese burlesque circa 1960s-80s. The program will also feature a set of live TPOP (Taiwanese pop) performance and “Taike” dance. All the performances are supported by members of HzCollective, WeArts, Taiwanese Student Association and the McIntire Department of Music Department at the University of Virginia. Li Chen of Cafe 88 will provide Taiwanese snacks and delicacies.
All proceeds from the event will go to Children Welfare League Foundation of Taiwan [http://www.children.org.tw/] toward their typhoon Morakot relief efforts for the affected children and families.
Friday October 30, 7:30pm
The Bridge PAI [http://thebridgepai.com]
209 Monticello Road
Charlottesville, VA 22902
non-students: $12
students: $8
Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158275236852
More info: wendy.f.hsu [at] gmail.com
This semester while teaching an upper level seminar on Media, Culture & Society, my students and I have been reading and discussing the social effects of new media. We mostly talk about what is “new” to us, such as digital media and social media, but we also think historically about radical changes in media technologies and how society has responded to those changes. Through all this, we’ve been putting our thoughts into practice by testing out different social media in the classroom.
We started out in an inhospitable room with no computer and chairs bolted to the floor. If we hadn’t had the aid of sociology department staff and the registrar to get us a more appropriate room, this course would have been entirely different. Thanks to their help, we now have the luxury of a computer lab room with chairs on wheels. Each student has access to their own desktop and I can project from an instructor computer. This room change gave us the opportunity to test out how we might incorporate social media into in-class discussions. First I’ll talk about what we did and then about what I think it means in terms of student learning.
Tools
First we used Collab, an innovative attempt by the University to create course homepages in the form of collaborative work groups. Its similar to the Blackboard interface, but is more flexible in its design. Unfortunately, Collab is also buggier. We couldn’t add media to the wiki page, couldn’t cut and paste from Word into the blogger feature, and real time collaboration was difficult. While it is a great improvement over the one way communication of earlier programs, it created more headaches that just talking together or writing on a piece of paper.
So we moved on to Google Docs. I have reservations about the use of commercial web based tools in the classroom because it forces students to choose a particular product, or at the very least advertises the features of Google over those of other tools. But then again, the University has scrapped its mail system in favor of Gmail, so the boundary between educational and corporate is already quite blurry. Google docs worked quite well for text, but real time collaboration was a little stilted and sometimes students lost information. Only ten of us could edit at a time, which was frustrating in a class of eighteen. People can easily loose focus when they can’t participate.
This past week a student suggested drop.io as a collaboration solution. So far, this is the most versatile program, though it too has its bugs and frustrations. It allows us to collaborate in real time, without the loss of contributions, allows us to chat while we add content, and allows media file sharing as well as text. You can even call your contribution in from your cell phone and it will leave an mp3 file of your voice mail on the drop. The downside of this program is that entries are organized chronologically and not even the administrator has the ability to change the the date and time. So, for instance, as I uploaded our earlier content from Collab and Google, it appears first rather than last. There is also no tagging system to organize information, which may make this interface unwieldy by the end of the semester. Unless I upgrade from the free account to the $19.95/mo account, or find a better free program, we’ll have to live with these problems.
Learning
When we first used drop.io, I asked students to create a “note” about the Internet privacy concerns that they had read about in Solove’s The Future of Reputation. I then asked them to add links to other privacy scandals or issues they had heard about. As I read theirs from my computer and added my own, a heard a few students wheeling around to ask questions of others, but it was relatively silent apart from the clunky click of Dell desktop keyboards. When I next looked at my watch 30 minutes had passed in this manner, and my students were still silent and concentrating on their task. No one even drifted off to youtube or to check their email.
At that moment I wasn’t sure if this was a positive learning experience or not. If it was, did we really need to be in the same room? If it wasn’t, had I just wasted half a class period? I reconvened us for a face-to-face discussion. In this discussion, I realized that it hadn’t been a waste of time, and that we did need to be meeting in the classroom. Starting the period with social media addressed several perpetual problems in classroom discussions. It 1) allowed students to converse in public without being “on the spot,” alleviating concern about an immediate assessment from the teacher, and leaving room for more reserved students to participate equally 2) helped students to refer back to the ideas of specific fellow students using their names and 3) primed students not only for what they would present in the large group discussion, but also for how they could respond to the ideas of others, moving discussion forward in an interactive and coherent manner.
There are also some downsides. Looking back at our conversation in the drop, its not nearly as vibrant as it was in person. Its more like a series of preliminary sketches than an account of what happened. If we were using paper, its more likely that students would polish a “product” for submission that would better represent the discussion. Also, this kind of activity requires resources. In many university settings, including my own, its not possible for all students to have access to a computer in the classroom.
Despite these drawbacks and continued limitations of the web based programs themselves, I see some intriguing possibilities for the incorporation of social media into classrooms as a means to increase horizontal communication among students and to quickly construct a collective knowledge base.
9 performers played for 30 out of 60 minutes @ the Bridge PAI, organized by Jonathan Zorn
setting up
The Secret
We were driven back underground by the local economy. Or was it local politics? Organizers of noise shows have always had a hard time securing venue spaces, but recently in Richmond and Charlottesville, art galleries, particularly small non-profit or grassroots galleries have become reliable partners. Yet in this economy, such spaces are having a hard time paying the bills. In Richmond, they face an additional challenge from the city, as CAPS (an organization that fights “blight”) has cracked down on occupancy rules and threatened to issue fines. This is a hard spot for small galleries whose only hope at the moment is to find funds to buy a special permit from the city.
But you can’t keep good noise, and good noise organizing, down. Kenneth Yates moved the show to an old warehouse and changed it from a public event to a private one. With a plan to meet at a pub in Church Hill prior to the event, a small group of 10 artists and enthusiasts chatted over drinks about CAPS, the new performing arts center, and the possibility of forming an arts district business association. This intimate gathering set the stage for a noise show featuring Philip White, collaborating with Caustic Castle (Yates), Jonathan Zorn and Erik DeLuca, and my own project with Wendy Hsu, Grapefruit Experiment.
The Show
Dance punk and IDM blared out of a laptop as everyone set up amidst letter press equipment, cans of paint and a haystack of electrical wires. Wendy and I had planned to go on first, but her mixer started smoking. Frustrating, but not much of a surprise given the varying voltages we were plugging in and rearranging, Jon explained. Instead, Jon and Erik went on first with a continuous set that varied subtle white noise with penetrating bird sounds. Erik incorporated the crackle of broken cables as gestures that responded to the birds as Jon created a sparse yet dynamic landscape of shifting tones. At one moment the set appeared to come to a natural close, and as Jon forged ahead, drawing new lines on his wacom tablet, Erik entered again with a wall of sound that gave new direction to the set. While it was their first time performing together, the audience would never have known it.
Secret Show
In our set as Grapefruit Experiment, Wendy and I were working out a new set up. Our theme was futurism of the past and our ethos was “work.” I used a new instrument built by Softpieces (Zach Mason) which is a pill bottle with a contact mic on the bottom and paper clip “feet” designed to pick up the resonance of containers. It looks like a moon lander. Wendy had a broken accordion (mailed to her from Craig’s List in a broken box without any packing materials) and she wanted to play it as a shell of a deceased instrument.
The idea for the piece was that she would be working on mechanical technologies circa 1930s and that I would learn from her and begin my own work on analog technologies circa 1960s – moving from the industrial to the space age with little awareness of how our work would affect the future, believing we were the future. We were very surprised by how it turned out: This is the second half of the set.
The headliner Philip White and Caustic Castle brought the show to a climactic close in a sometimes harsh, sometimes rhythmic conversation. Caustic Castle used his self-designed no-input mixer to deftly craft a range of tones and timbres as White combined a laptop, unmarked boxes of switches and a huge mixer to shape the flow of events.
Secret Show
Today was the first day I tried commuting via bike to school from Belmont. As a kid, I was not allowed to bike in the road. That street, Salmon Falls Rd., was once a country road that has now become a dense cut through where cars drive like they are in the country – with no regard for other cars or even residents. There have never been shoulders for bikers or pedestrians. I had to settle for biking in our small driveway.
The downtown and University area of Charlottesville is a far more bike friendly than the Salmon Falls Rd. It has an ethos of being “green,” a relatively great bus system (for a town this size), and has some bike lanes. As gas prices rose and green consciousness expanded, more and more bikes have begun to dot the University’s landscape.
But its still hell for bikers in this town. I would love to commute everyday by bike, and have wanted to try it for years. But the stories of regular bikers – doors of parked cars pop open in your face, drivers yell at you to “get on the sidewalk where you belong,” horns honk, and UTS buses squeeze you out on campus. In spite of this, there is safety in numbers, and I felt it today on Main Street where three of us bikers caused a UPS truck to slow down and give us the right of way.
By coincidence, I ended up at at talk this evening at the Charlottesville Community Design Center (CCDC) about re-envisioning the road. A UVa professor (whos name was lost to me) gave a fascinating talk on the history of the streets, focusing on the shift in the 1920s from pedestrian-owned to car-owned streets. He began with the common phrase “our love affair with the automobile” – a phrase that is often used to justify car centered urban space or to lament the inevitability of car-centered development. This phrase came from a program, put on television in 1961 by Dupont and hosted by Groucho Marx. The schtick was that men would fall in love with their beauties (cars), date them, and marry them, staying together for better or worse. A curious gender politics as well as auto-politics. This notion continues to permeate our culture.
It was also part of a much larger campaign (on the part of car manufacturers) to reclaim the streets in favor of the car. In the early 1920s, the deaths of pedestrians, particularly the deaths of children, lead to public outrage and attempts to put legal restrictions on motorists, particularly on speed. In Cleveland, the town lobbied to force manufacturers to install a speed limiter, allowing vehicles to go no faster than 25 mph. These laws, and the bad PR of kids getting crushed by these new machines daily, led car companies on a crusade to reinvent the streets as spaces for cars.
The main thrust of this campaign was to shift responsibility for accidents from drivers to children and their parents. Associations like AAA were instrumental in public reeducation. Coloring books, school safety courses and pamphlets were churned out by the thousands. Children were taught to fear the road and “look both ways” before crossing. You have to understand, prior to this, people just hung out in the streets and crossed wherever they liked – they considered this a public right.
The second pillar of this campaign was a reinvention of the role of streets in the city. Models at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 demonstrated this new city in a Le Coubusier fashion – high towers in pods with cars whipping around on multi-lane highways. Like Atlanta today, if in fact the cars weren’t always backed up in traffic. Perhaps most striking in the effort to envision the city of the future as a city of car traffic was in the emergence of the Jaywalker – the pedestrian who did not follow the rules that allowed cars to dominate the streets. Jaywalking was once a derogatory term used in the Midwest for country folk who didn’t know how to navigate city streets. Being in the street was no longer a right of the public, but something you did if you were non-urban, stuck in pre-modern times.
This mentality still pervades the streets of Charlottesville (an otherwise green, open minded town) today. Police (let alone other traffic) fail to stop at crosswalks on the Avon Street Bridge while pedestrians are sandwiched between speeding traffic eager to catch the light. Drivers yell at pedestrians in crosswalks. A police officer hit a man in a wheelchair in a crosswalk last year. However, you can still get cited for Jaywalking or for biking in ways that break traffic rules made for cars, even if breaking the rule is safer than following it.
At the end, the speaker was asked: what do we do? His job was to tell us that history can help us reinvent the future. Car dominated streets are not inevitable. We have more public rights that the right to drive.
Related:
Fenwick holds forum highlighting opposition to Meadowcreek Parkway from Charlottesville Tomorrow on Vimeo.
This week seems to be filled with the angst and anticipation of a new year as the kids (and lifelong learners) head back to school. My first day was today, and after holding my first class with bright students eager to learn more about sociology and media, I remembered why I love the classroom and its process of interaction and co-discovery. It primed me for an evening of events around town that combined plentiful creativity with community action.
I headed first to the closing reception of the Suitcase Show hosted by at the Garage on 1st St., a new “venue” that is literally a freestanding garage downtown in which enterprising young artists have hosted gallery openings, DJ nights and bands. The Suitcase Show was a physical, performative manifestation of the drawing group that produced it. The drawing group, meeting more or less regularly for the past few years, works with basic materials – markers, magazines, ink, staples, and lo-fi paper. Their work has been stored in a suitcase and has, for the month of August, hung from the walls of the garage by paper clips and picture nails. The original drawing group, joined by several young artists and their parents, worked out new ideas in the sweaty heat of the small room while I looked around at the work on the walls. The work was never attributed to a particular artist. It wasn’t that kind of show. I decided to buy (for “pay what you can – all drawings must go”) a piece that reminded me of Kenneth Yates‘ situationist-inspired screen prints on gentrification – it was angular, stark and minimal, like a corporate building sitting on top of a futuristic hand gun. I took another picture from the suitcase to hang a replacement.
After going home to sort out mind-numbing course enrollment issues, I headed back out to IS where the Wordsmith Poetry Jam open mic was in its sixth gathering. The talent was astounding and the audience buzzed with feedback. The host, Black Violet, modestly yet deftly brought the crowd into the creative mindspace of the artists, priming us for their words, beats, rhymes and guitar riffs. She taught the cautious crowd to flow, inviting us to release inhibitions and speak out. And then she schooled us on basic skills – “Where are we tonight? Word ____ [SMITH] Poetry ____[Jam]!”
I was able to catch several acts, from a 30 second mind bend on the word hallucination: hell. loose. nation. to Lester’s emotive, spine tingling songs of sensuality [he needs to put out his next album soon]. The night was brought to the perfect climax of community and creative energy when the headliner, Iman “Herukane” Shabazz (of Tuesday Verses) chose to be fully in the moment: The Herukane began: I was really inspired by everything I’ve heard tonight, so I’m going to do something a little creative, can I get my man Lester and my man Bernard up here? As Lester played the hook of his first song, Bernard vocally brought in a booming bass and sharp snare to lay the foundation for Herukane’s flow. Earlier, Herukane spoke the truth on the political perils of consumerism in culture and love, but now he spoke of those perils in the soul. As Herukane conjured up Grand Master Flash, crafting his voice into sounds that were once only made by machines, I realized that this was one of the most amazing musical moments I have witnessed in Charlottesville, or in any place.
Both of these shows reaffirm the idea that engagement, co-presence, and indeed political change, can come through sharing artistically creative moments. Thanks to everyone for the inspiration.
The annual meeting of sociologists offers both intellectual inspiration and anxiety as both new and established scholars try to connect with others in a sea of over 6,000 colleagues. I felt in the thick of it this year as a presenter, job seeker and attendee. My concerns about the grim job market were calmed by old friends, chance encounters with interesting people, and great papers. I came away with a better sense of what I want to do, seeing the scarcity of jobs as a creative opportunity rather than reason for despair.
I had the chance to reconnect with my undergraduate mentor from Bates, Emily Kane. Her paper on public sociology for the teaching and learning section raised questions about how liberal arts students approach sociology as a discipline and as a tool for social change. She found that students had little sense of professionalized sociology and were disheartened to learn that its reward systems direct young scholars away from social justice and the empowerment of others. Their disappointment and frustration was familiar, but I’ve moved on to an enduring alienation suppressed by my desire to achieve within the given parameters for success.
Before this, I met Norma and Ed, a dynamic older couple native to San Fransisco. At Tartine, a bakery in the Mission, Norma, dressed in hiking gear and round wire framed glasses, asked me and Wendy – “do they have sticky buns today?” From there we struck up a conversation, later joined by Ed, about what we do and what there is to do in San Fransisco. Exchanging contact information we later learned that this couple knew nearly everyone, young, old and in between who was involved in creative and socially minded work. Ed, once working for the city on arts development, is currently consulting for an Anime project in J-town. Norma is a consultant on cultural diversity in education. While I didn’t have as much chance as I would have liked to spend time with them, they were an inspiration, and a model for meaningful living and working. They were entrepreneurs with social and creative goals and they reached out to others with a sense of trust and purpose.
A conversation with a fellow graduate student jarred me back to the parameters of the tough job market in academic sociology. “I’m willing to go anywhere. Do you think it would be to my advantage to tell hiring committees that I am unattached? Its just me, no partner, no kids and no plans for any of it. I am after the job, period.” I wondered, is this what we must do to ourselves? Craft our lives, goals and desires around the career, rather than craft a career that enables us to do the kinds of teaching, scholarship and community engagement that we seek? I can’t help but think such a reorientation would be better for professional sociology as well as for the individuals working within it.
Despite the unnerving fervor of professionalization that permeates the ASA, I attended paper presentations that inspired me to push forward as a scholar and seek ways to balance contributions to sociological knowledge with contributions to social good. I’ll review just one here – the thematic session on Music Communities and Youth Culture. I got there late due to employment service obligations, and entered a room charged with ideas. Since one presenter had canceled, the presider, Tammy L. Anderson, author of Rave Culture, turned it into an interactive panel discussion. David Grazian, author of Chicago Blues and On the Make, offered questions to the panelists such as “what is the changing nature of youth” as economic forces stall adulthood and older adults continue to participate in subcultures? “What is the role of new media technologies” in the distribution and experience of musical community and subcultural identity? These questions were deftly answered by the panelists Paul Hodkinson and Ross Haenfler. The audience responded in kind, offering questions, field experiences, and personal accounts of music cultures in which they lived and studied.
I came away from trip with a better sense of what I want to do. My scholarship on music cultures can be an avenue for teaching students literacy in new media; my research on the use of arts in urban development can be a resource for local galleries working to empower communities through the arts. If not via professional sociology, then I’ll seek it out by whatever means are available.
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
July 13-17, 2009
The meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in Liverpool was full of excellent papers from scholars around the globe. Sociologists, anthropologists, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, geographers, urbanists and others presented work on the practice, expressive meanings and significance of popular music in a wide variety of cultural contexts.
Of particular interest (to me and the packed classroom) was Sara Cohen’s current work on musicians’ maps of the city. Asking musicians to both narrate and draw maps of their careers, Cohen showed how different demographic groups, represented by their participation in indie rock and hip-hop, experience the city differently. These differences have consequences for culture-led urban regeneration, which has tended to focus on rock histories and spaces over other genres. Yet even for rock artists, venues, rehearsal spaces and even residences have been displaced by gentrification. It was fascinating to later visit this city as a music tourist after reading Cohen’s work on Liverpool!
Beatles Tribute @ Cavern Club
Pyramid Atlantic
Sliver Spring, MD
Grapefruit Experiment’s first US performance for Queering Sound, a music and arts festival for DC Pride Week. Collaboration with Martin Terrazas. Photos by Hong Nguyen.
