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The Sociological Onema:Teaching and Learning Sociology through Video. Valerie Chepp, Paul Dean, and Lester Andrist, editors and publishers. http://www .diesociologicalcinema.com.
Many sociology instructors use video clips to visually illustrate sociological concepts with the goals of further engaging students, breaking up lectures, and drawing in those students who might not otherwise respond to the course content. But finding and successfully integrating video clips into the classroom can be a laborious process. The time it takes to find just the right clip and determine how best to integrate it into lecture or classroom discussion can deter even the most motivated instructors from making video a central feature of classroom pedagogy.
If you ever have taken on the time-consuming task of finding and integrating video clips into your sociology classes, you will especially appreciate The Sociological Cinema Web site. In fact, you may feel like you've hit the jackpot. Users will be struck by this Web site's simple yet thoughtful design, which is clearly intended to help instructors incorporate videos into their classes.
The home page includes links to videos, a blog, teaching resources, and more. The "video" link leads to a searchable database of 235 (and growing) video clips, each tagged and organized according to 48 sociological themes that include "capitalism," "class," "gender," "historical sociology," "social psychology," and "Weber." The video clips are also tagged by length - from less than 5 minutes to 60 minutes. Perhaps most useful, each video clip is accompanied by a summary that places it in sociological context. For example, one clip promotes fairtrade coffee with the suggestion that it be paired with Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Instructors can easily build on or deviate from the recommendations by adding their own twists to serve the particular needs of a course.
The Sociological Cinema also posts interactive blogs offering commentary, video recommendations, and research related to the efficacy of using film, multimedia, and other visual aids. As one example, the blog titled The Commercials of Super Bowl Sunday and the New Masculinity includes a discussion of representations of masculinity in popular media that incorporates links to relevant Super Bowl ads,...