User:Htw3/Autumn 2008 Projects

General Project Goals

Due date: Friday of Week 10. March 12th.

Your task is to provide a new and interesting insight into sociological issues and concepts from this class as they relate to social change in some group, institution, or relationship(s). Learning objectives for the project: (1) build in-depth understanding of a concept addressed in soc 101 (2) convey the value of understanding that concept(s) for understanding something about social change (3) gain experience in production of a multi-media presentation (4) communicate to a global audience (5) create something of value beyond a simple assignment.

Three fundamental rules: 1. Do no harm. Don't make anything that you would not be proud to have associated with you, your university, and your career. 2. Show integrity. Give credit where due for materials and work used in your creation, be explicit about the nature of your contribution, and make sure that group is the source of creative contribution of the project. 3. Be creative. This is your chance to transcend the simple term paper, so make something new and interesting.

Forbidden: Finally, although these may seem interesting, "tell-all" documentaries of drinking or university dating culture are over done, and are totally off-limits for this assignment.

Advice from TAs: A TA from earlier versions of this class offered some advice and it is still helpful. (1) Do something new and innovative. This means finding novel topics, combining ideas in news ways, or applying a theory to a topic that one might not expect. (2) Avoid overused topics. It is a lot harder to stand out and get a good grade if your group is one of several on the same topic. The most over-used topic has been using a fraternity or sorority as group. Be more innovative than that. (3) Don't skimp. The concept "aggregate" is not very interesting, nor sociological, and a bunch of pictures of crowds of people illustrating the concept of "aggregate" is barely meeting the minimum expectations for the assignment. (4) Connect concepts clearly. The connection between the content and the concepts from the course should be strong, and the concepts should really help us understand something NEW about what is going on in the example/topic.

Flickr or Picassa Photo Essays

Students create instructional and artistic photo essays concerning the intersection of ideas from course with topics available in and around Athens Ohio. Photo essay themes are to be proposed by students. Photo essayists are welcome to work independently or in teams of 2-4. A group as large as 4 is allowed, but the expectation is that the photo essay will be longer, and make more connections to course ideas. Standard length photo essays will be about 12-15 photos long. Each photo should have a meaningful title. The 'essay' part should be made in the photo description section, and can vary in length from a sentence or two, to a long paragraph as seems appropriate given the photo and the ideas you want to convey.

How we will evaluate Photo-Essay Projects

Once again, the instructional component is most important. Entertaining is good, and decent production values are worth something too. But by far most of my evaluation will be on the capacity of your project to teach about and encourage interest in concepts, theories, and research in sociology. The slide shows on SoulofAthens are great examples. Since Flickr does not have audio-- you should begin your photo set with a brief comment that frames the project. Use informative titles for you shots. The final shot in the series should have an artists statement about the ideas that informed the contents and arrangement of your photo essay. You will hopefully get some good comments from others. Your responses to those comments are also part of your project.

Technical issues for digital image projects

If you shoot all of your own images you are the copyright holder. You might consider using a copyright restriction that allows non commercial reuse of your images with proper attribution (that is, other people can use your image if they give you credit and they don't use your image to make money). Sources for all images used in your slide show should be reported on a slide that lists the slides in order and provides source attribution information. If you use images found online you should determine the copyright associated with the image. Check out the Creative Commons page for copyright options to consider for you project and for evaluation of possible source materials: [| Creative Commons, About]

YouTube Projects

Students will create instructional and entertaining films concerning an important concept from our intro to sociology course. Students propose topics, and work in teams of 2-5. Films should be brief-- no longer than 4-5 min. The examples give a good sense of strategies that have worked well in the past, varying from voice over with slides to live action dramas. The more people the more substantial the film should be (in terms of effort, quality, production values, etc.)

How we will evaluate YouTube Projects

The instructional component is most important. Entertaining is good, and decent production values are worth something too. But by far most of our evaluation will be on the capacity of your project to teach about and encourage interest in concepts, theories, and research in sociology. The clips we showed in class got good grades. Other projects did also, but we should learn something when done. All the better if we laugh along the way or are amazed by some other attribute of your video. Make sure the connection to course material is clear.

an iPhone application or other real world digital contribution

Another totally viable path to a successful project is an application for use on the iPhone platform that is sociologically relevant. I realize this is a stretch, but if we have any programmers in the class, or even any entrepreneurs who can create a viable concept and contract a programmer are welcome to create an application for the iPhone platform.

Wikipedia Projects

There are several pages in the Sociology project sections that are defined as stubs but have high importance. Make substantial improvements to a sociology article and write up your experience for a blog post. This is a good option for individuals who enjoyed the Wikipedia assignment and want to keep working on articles there. This is essentially just a more extensive version of that assignment.

Bonus: make a splash

All the projects in this class involve the creation of a public digital object. Those objects will be available for others to see, evaluate and comment on. Drive the popularity of your project to internet fame and enhance your grade. As a baseline, the most popular YouTube video from an earlier class has received 400 views. With a good project, and some effort leveraging social networks and online groups a motivated student group ought to be able to drive much more attention than that in a short time period. Show an impressive drive at increasing the viewership of your video, slides, or blog entry and improve your grade. Note: the catch is that if you are seeking this bonus strategy you will also need to write a one page summary of your efforts, the logic behind those attention magnifying efforts, and the sociological significance of your strategies in terms of models of collective action. Go ahead and look up some definitions of collective action.

Getting Started

Find people to collaborate with. Groups were primarily organized during Winter of 2010 via the project blog, or through existing groups.
The first step in group organization is detailed on the blog. Here: http://projectsinsocandsocialchange.blogspot.com/2010/02/group-thread.html
The next steps are posted on another blog post.
Further details will be posted to a forthcoming blog post.

Advice

Create a project that is instructional about sociology and interesting. Why? Sociology need not be boring. Our lives our filled with interesting examples of processes and outcomes that are directly related to areas of research in sociology. Connect those in an interesting and compelling way.
Be creative.
Demonstrate understanding of sociological concepts. Part of your grade will depend on how much of your understanding of sociological ideas comes through in your project.

Examples from earlier classes

Examples from Winter 2009 (Presented in class)

Other examples of youtube clips with relevant parts