Welcome! I know it’s not easy to hit the ground running after a long summer, but please take some time at least to skim the readings below. The rest of this post provides a brief outline of what we’ll be doing on the first day.
Prep
- Ground Rules for the Classroom
- Caroline Hodges Persell, Kathryn M. Pfeiffer, and Ali Syed, ‘What Should Students Learn After Taking Intro Sociology?’, Teaching Sociology35 (October 2007)
In Class
- Review: Ground Rules for the Classroom
- Attendance/Introductions
- Ten Things You Should Understand (Better) After This Course
- Q&A: What Is Sociology? Towards a Working Definition
- BREAK
- Low-Stakes Writing Assignment: What Are Your Goals for the Course?
- For Next Time
For Next Time
- Little, William, and Ron McGivern. n.d. Introduction to Sociology, 1stCanadian Edition, Ch. 2 (‘Sociological Research’), esp. Sections 2.1 (‘Approaches to Sociological Research’) and 2.2 (‘Research Methods’)
- Michael A. Caulfield, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers(2017), Part I (‘Four Strategies and a Habit’); Part II (‘Look for Previous Work’), Chs. 4 (‘How to Use Previous Work’), 5 (‘Fact-Checking Sites’), 6 (‘Wikipedia’); Part III, Ch. 7 (‘Going Upstream to Find the Source’); Part IV (‘Reading Laterally’), Chs. 16 (‘What Reading Laterally Means’), 17 (‘Evaluating a Website or Publication’s Authority’), 18 (‘Basic Techniques: Web Domains, WHOIS’); 20 (‘Stupid Journal Tricks’); 21 (‘Finding a Journal’s Impact Factor’); 22 (‘Using Google Scholar to Evaluate Author Expertise’), 23 (‘How to Think About Research’), 24 (‘Finding High Quality Secondary Sources’), 25 (‘Choosing Your Experts First’), 26 (‘Evaluating News Sources’), 27 (‘What Makes a Trustworthy News Source?’), 28 (‘National Newspapers of Record’); Part VI (‘Field Guide’), Chs. 42 (‘Avoiding Confirmation Bias in Searches’), 44 (‘Finding Old Newspaper Articles’), and 45 (‘Using the Facebook Live Map to Find Breaking Coverage’)
