So I’m not a very creative person, and I’ve been trying to jot down as many ideas as possible, but so far have only been able to produce 1 and a half ideas, and here they are:

1. The half idea: I like the way memes play a part in the social life of the Internet. I was impressed with Patrick Davison’s ‘The Language of Internet Memes’ in The Social Media Reader, as well as our conversations about memes in the Core I class – their folk character, their ephemerality but also how they can provide a window into the cultural conversations of the time. I think it may be a good idea to show students how to create these cultural objects, how to trace their distribution in a social network and how to analyze the conversations people initiate because of the ideas embedded in those memes. This does not have to be a ‘creation’ activity only. Before students start creating their own memes, we could learn how to analyze the significance of past memes that garnered much attention (ex: #muslimrage, the ‘this is what I actually do’ meme, etc.). Students will learn about the context of such memes (why and how did they start?), and learn how to analyze their impact on the communication, spread, and death of ideas.

2. Creating an intro level Sociology inter-textbook: For an intro level class in Sociology, almost all professors use a large and expensive textbook that is usually never bought or read by the students (at least in my experience at BMCC, where students come from financially unstable backgrounds). I’ve been thinking of ways to provide students with the relevant chapters as cheaply as possible without violating copyright laws, but it still does not seem to be enough. Even if they have access to the material, it is often written in a language that is not at their reading level and/or does not engage them enough. Thinking through how to get the students to engage with any material before class, and connecting it with the principle of intertextuality at the core of the Internet as well as the principles of collaboration, citation and source-recognition at the core of Wikipedia, has led me to this idea: the students will use the Internet’s many ‘texts’ (written, pictures, videos, audio, games) to create their own chapters on a very large online cork board-type space (pinterest?). As the professor, I would provide lots of structure, like taking the main concepts found in one textbook chapter and setting them up on the board in a logical manner, and guiding the students to figure out what is a good source and what is an unreliable source of information. The students will then post (under their assigned concept) any relevant texts that provide the definition of the concept, examples of the concept, people associated with the concept, etc, with a brief explanation of what the post is and how it relates to the concept. Students will also be required to comment upon and question the postings of other students and thereby engage in a dialogue about their interpretation of the concepts. To make this as close to a traditional textbook as possible, the questions on any quizzes or tests will relate directly back to the boards they create. In short, I envision this as a space for students to create their own chapters, still working with the concepts that any traditional textbook would contain, but making it their own by posting texts that make sense of the ideas to them and engaging with other students about the validity of their sources and the level of understanding they have about the concepts. Class time would be used to go over the board the students have created during the week and fill in any gaps or correct any inaccurate information.

Hello everyone! I’m a third-year Sociology student. The question that drives my academic work is: how do we belong in this time of neoliberalism and globalization, and how does that belonging get strengthened for some and disrupted for others? I’ve focused this question down to questions of citizenship and embodiment during environmental disasters. I am particularly interested in observing the relationships between people and objects when preparing for and dealing with disasters, because I believe that studying such interactions can tell us something about how disasters are important in the social construction of belonging. Along with my research interests, I am also devoted to pedagogy and to being a public sociologist. I have taught ‘Introduction to Sociology’ and ‘Media Theory’ (at BMCC and City College, respectively), and have also started a personal academic blog to help me start and explore ideas that may become research projects in the future: www.socobjects.org, which is still in a nascent stage with only one post so far. And here’s my twitter handle: @hamsindh.

I am an English doctoral student at the CUNY Grad Center. I am interested in rhetoric and composition, ELL (English Language Learner) writers, the history of education, and the relationships between technology, pedagogy and writing. At BMCC (CUNY), I am the coordinator of the ESL (English as a Second Language) Lab, where I oversee a staff of writing tutors, as well as an adjunct writing instructor in the English Department (when I have time to teach).

Jared R. Pike is a Ph.D. student at The Graduate Center, CUNY whose work focuses on the cultural power dynamics in theatrical performance. Current research interests include: the role of space in performances of history, digital media in the performance of history in museums, and the cultural power dynamics in German theatre during the period of unification.

Here are a few project ideas I’ve been considering lately:

1. For the Core 1 term paper, I considered how digital technologies could be utilized in teaching introductory linguistics courses. I reflected on our readings and discussions of education and learning, and decided that some existing technologies could be used in combination to assist students in analyzing language they use or encounter in their homes and communities. The issue is that most linguistic analyses utilize “cooked data”: clean categorical representations of the real continuous messy data. Cooked data is typically used to do analyses in intro classes because eliciting and cooking the data yourself is difficult and time-consuming. The basic idea I’m considering is creating a cooking suite (called “The Linguists Kitchen”?), where existing speech analysis and transcription tools are brought together in a very user-friendly way. While this will not automate the cooking process, it may at least provide an opportunity for students to try analyzing language that they actually interact with, which may make studying linguistics a more meaningful experience.

2. As an experimental linguist, I often think about the logistics of finding and recruiting participants for experiments. I’ve been thinking about the possibility of creating some sort of database where individuals interested in participating in research can sign up and list (or not list) various traits they possess that experimenters may be interested in (I’m thinking of traits related to language knowledge and usage). While something like this may be extremely useful to researchers, it seems like it would raise a number of ethical issues concerning confidentiality, security of personal information, etc. Perhaps an equally useful alternative would be to create a CUNY-wide database of ongoing research projects in need of participants. Individuals interested in participating in research could then peruse participant selection criteria and contact experimenters if they find a project they’d like to be a part of.

3. For the past year, I’ve been meeting weekly with a small writing group of fellow linguistics students. We help each other set writing goals, balance our personal work with our many other commitments, and find ways to help each other meet the goals we set out for ourselves. This group has been extremely helpful and, lately, I’ve been wondering if we could be even more useful by actually participating in each other’s writing process. This idea sprouted while I was somewhere in Chapter 2 of Planned Obsolescence and was crushed when I got to Chapter 3 and discovered that CommentPress exists. I’d like to try using CommentPress this semester with my writing group to figure out if there are any modifications we could make to align it more with (or better complement) the nature of our in-person interactions.