The Society Pages scored a nice little win in Las Vegas last week—not at the slots or the craps tables, but at the 6th Annual Meetings of the Sloan Consortium for Emerging Technologies for On-Line Learning. Our award was for Outstanding Peer-Reviewed, On-line Resource in Sociology. It came, unsolicited and much appreciated, from the Merlot (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and On-line Teaching) group, whose social science committee was chaired by Mike Miller, a sociologist at the University of Texas, San Antonio.
It’s a major award!
The conference was an eye-opener in many ways. An amazing array of new technologies and devices and platforms for higher education is already on the market or in production, and the amount of energy and capital devoted to new resources is astounding. (One plenary speaker claimed that venture capitalists invested over $1 billion in educational startup funds in 2012 alone.)
We were also honored to give a presentation on TSP. I gave a quick overview of the site and all its wonderful features and contributions, and talked about the unique publishing partnership with Norton that is our support system. And there was a good deal of talk and exchange—both enlightening and inspiring—about all of the ways in which the site is used for teaching and learning these days.
When Chris Uggen and I were editing Contexts magazine, we had a feature call “reflected appraisals” where we tracked media references to sociology and sociologists (it was a precursor of sorts to our current Citings & Sightings feature). We were inspired by the old sociological adage that you learn about yourself by paying attention to how others perceive you. Well, at the Sloan/Merlot Consortium, we learned a couple of things about TSP. One is that while we often stress our accessibility (both in terms of the language and the open-access nature of the site), it’s really the multiple formats of content and content delivery that folks find particularly unique and useful: podcasts, images and video clips, interactive graphics, essays, and the like. Another thing we saw on display was the tremendous synergy between public engagement and the teaching and learning of social science. We often focus on the former, but one of our largest and most dedicated followings is from sociology students and teachers at both the collegiate and high school level. In other words, it appears that the TSP content and formats that work for a general public readership also serve teachers and learners in a range of very important ways.
Finally, we couldn’t help but think about how much work remains to continue to build and sustain what we’re doing. Excited and inspired as we all are about online, open-access, multimedia resources for the social sciences, we were reminded that the best material available online (as distinct from all of the platforms and technologies being marketed by educational companies) remain, essentially and fundamentally, labors of love. We need to figure out how to sustain and support such operations and initiatives in the coming years. Hopefully, TSP can be a leader on that front. It is definitely what our fans and new friends at Merlot and the Sloan Consortium seem to be expecting.