Skills!

In the comments section, please post any skills you have that may be beneficial and useful in the group projects.

Ideas!

Please post any ideas you may have for the project your groups will be completing this quarter in the comments section of this post.

Intro to Student Projects

Like water to fish.

We all live in society. We are all parts of our culture, and are involved in groups, organizations, and sub-cultures. We learn and respond to social norms, we recognize different social roles, and are embedded in different social structures. These concepts, and many more besides, refer to aspects of our social world that can help us understand how and why things happen the way that they do.

Although norms, roles, social structure, and sub-cultures are parts of our lives everyday, most of the time, most people don't think about them one bit. However, it is often the case that a little reflection can go a long way towards making sense of everyday events. A central aim of this course is to help people see and understand aspects of the social world in ways that are helpful and interesting.

We all become teachers.

This quarter students will work in groups of 3-5 to create projects that teach about sociological concepts in ways that are effective, interesting, and entertaining. Student projects will be publicly presented via a post on this blog, and through whatever publication medium is standard for the project (youtube, flickr, picassa, wikipedia, etc.). Details about the project requirements will be posted on the course webpage. Note that earlier quarters of 101 did not use a blog, so the following examples lack blogpost write ups which will be required for the current course.

Examples of successful projects from earlier quarters:

1. Faces of Athens, a flickr photo set. This photo set was created by a photo-journalism major almost two years ago. The set is successful for the imagery, for the commentary that brought in concepts from sociology, but primarily, because of the combination of the two.

2. You tube video, slide show. Body image and the media. Two students teamed up in 2008 to make this video, and it remains one of the most popular projects to come out of this course. They did a great job of using concepts, addressing important issues, and making it interesting.

3. Youtube video, live action. This video was produced in Winter of 2009 by a group of about 5 students. They did a good job of bringing humor and some thoughtful reflection together in the same video.