In the introductory course in Sociology we wrote a Wiki. It was a short and enjoyable explosion of sociological thought-experiments. Students read the introductory textbook, selected a topic they were genuinely interested in, wrote a short article and posted it in the Wiki.
In about 50 days students produced 90 Wiki-articles. The Wiki functioned as a digital classroom in which we could write a comment to each other’s texts. In the end 17 students selected their one best article. The screenshot shows the titles of these articles i then presented in ebook format.
Extract from the Introduction to Eat drink sociology. Royal Academy for the Arts / Year 2015/16 / Educational Publication: ‘In supermarkets in the UK they used to sell wheat cookies with the brand name ‘Digestives’. I now refuse the nostalgic temptation to google if they still exist. It must be one of the most horrible brand names ever invented. But eating digestives made me feel ‘non-hungry’ and relatively happy for an hour or two.
Now this is what we did in this introductory course in sociology: we ate some Marx and drank a bit of Durkheim and Hochschild, we mixed this with our own tastes, observations and interpretations. A small collection of articles is the relatively solid result in a liquid society.
Cultures, societies, groups, identities and everyday life
Basic ingredients we took from the book: Sociology by John Macionis and Ken Plummer (Pearson 5th Edition UK 2011); the Dutch version: Samenleving by Macionis, Peper and Van der Leun (Pearson 2014). We digested one chapter a week, on cultures, societies, groups, identities, everyday life. Some chapters were easy to digest, other chapters needed more effort or a make-over with some help of new thoughts and experiences.
Some cooks took their time, had a critical look and asked themselves a lot of questions. Others swallowed texts, threw mental excrements on screens and pushed save-buttons. This is the process of Wiki writing and most of us managed to produce both good pieces and bad pieces, such as the reality of productive life is when you have to produce a lot within a limited time. In the name of educational progress and development ….’
Wiki for Education
The articles were written for the Wiki during a short introductory course on Sociology for documentary photographers (2nd year 2015/2016). The Wiki was hosted at Wendorf Academy and powered by NEO, a Learning Management System (LMS, formerly Edu2.0). And this teacher would like to say great thanks to all students for their reading, thinking and writing.
Social Research&Journalism 