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Showing posts from July, 2010

Census Quick Facts

Need a quick fact from the census? Try http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html . Helpful data on race, gender, education, and disability, among other things.

TV by the Numbers

http://tvbythenumbers.com/ is a great resource for anyone studying the television industry. I'm particularly following their daily postings of the Nielsen overnights. http://tvbythenumbers.com/category/ratings/tv-ratings-nielsen-overnight-tv-show-ratings Until this site came along, TV ratings could actually be pretty hard to track down consistently.

Attendance Policies

A few years ago, in one class, I tried not grading for attendance but found the result to be that students skipped class at high levels, paid for it on assignments, and the resulting average was so low that I looked more like a bad teacher than a tough one. I also paid a price in emails and office hours spent re-hashing what I'd covered in class and I was embarrassed that my final evals indicated that very few of the enrolled students filled them out because attendance was low. So I do grade for attendance and I struggle through how to do it. My current system keeps attendance and participation separate. For attendance, I assign a fraction of a point based on the overall number of class meetings in the semester. This fall for instance, my class meets a total of 28 times, so each class is assigned 1/4th of a point. For every class attended, the student earns .25 points, up to the total of 7 points. Easy enough. The problem is, some students are going to miss sometimes, and de

Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film

http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/ This is a good resource for studying women in popular culture. The research reports--The Celluloid Ceiling (film) and Boxed In (TV)--are particularly good. They are very basic but provide straight-forward analysis that is often hard to find. What the Center does well is track women's representation on both sides of the camera. It's very helpful to remember that female characters in TV and film are often authored by male writers, directors, and videographers.

Designing a Research Intensive Class

I'm re-designing my course on popular culture for this fall to make it a research-intensive class. That's not a technical designation at Temple, the way that writing-intensive is, but it is a helpful way for me to think about bringing students into the data collection process. Until now, the course was always writing-intensive, so I guided students through the process of producing a sociology paper, but with a data set that included only 2 cultural objects--television shows, songs, magazines, films, etc.--that provided a useful comparison in terms of a sociological issue such as race, gender, or class. For the research-intensive version, students will be performing weekly content analyses of prime time television. I'm spending the summer writing the proposal, developing the protocols, and creating the coding sheet and codebook. I'm trying to develop a process for teaching research that--like my process for teaching writing--is transferable from one class to another