About

Welcome to the Sociology Team blog for Professor Pok’s students.  I created this blog in Spring 2011 for a number of reasons— the primary one being to test this digital medium as a pedagogical tool.  In other words, I wanted to see if a blogging platform could be a useful way to make what goes on inside a classroom more relevant to my students’ lives outside the classroom.

The second reason I created this blog was because I wanted to develop a space that was separate from students’ “social networked” lives to reinforce the boundaries between “casual” and “professional” settings.  In the age of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, today’s students are much more fluent and comfortable with sharing and re-posting news, information, media, etc.  As such, many tend to merge these two networks— and certainly a case can be made that the division is somewhat arbitrary— but I wanted to reinforce the idea that re-posting something they find interesting to friends is quite different from re-posting the same reference to colleagues.  The latter requires a more formal thought process; this blog does provide a space where students may share information, but it does so within specified boundaries and criteria.  Posts here require that students go beyond just hitting the “share” button.  Instead, their posts should be relevant to the larger sociological themes discussed in our classes.  In other words, I wanted students to share their views and stories from a sociological standpoint— to analyse the manifold ways in which sociological constructs such as inequality, gender, race, and social class are not just theories inside a classroom but have-real world implications and are intimately intertwined with their daily lives.

Thank you for stopping by and I hope you enjoy their work.