Information and Language Processing Systems group website has an interesting tool that provides a graphic representation of the moods reported by LiveJournal users in their posts. A Moodgrapher tracks about 100,000 posts everyday and graphs percentages of each mood. This tool is a base for a long-term research but here are some general trends revealed:

• The cyclic nature of many states-of-mind: e.g., people feel energetic in the mornings and relaxed in the evening
• Day-of-the-week related behavior: people tend to get drunk on weekends, feel busy on Monday morning, etc.
• The effect of global events on the global mood: e.g., mass increase in the level of distress and sadness after terror attacks.

Looking at the visual representation of mass emotions is absorbing, I spent quite some time looking at various spikes and thinking about why people feel "bitchy" or "blank." I wish quantitative research, which usually addresses the "how" question, were followed by qualitative research to answer the "why" question.

Ten tips for improving your teaching (Notes from a Career in Teaching, The Chronicle of Higher Ed):

1. Teach according to your personality. Choose how to dress and behave and what materials to teach according to who you are and what you believe in.
2. Hand out complete syllabi and course instructions the first day. Complete explicit instructions will let students know what to expect from and how to prepare for a course. Incomplete instructions cause confusion that interferes with teaching and learning.
3. Vary your teaching methods. Long lectures and class discussions are boring. Combinations of short lectures and focused discussions along with prepared questions and written answers produce better results and encourage participation.
4. Let students choose their grades. Basically, it means no curves. Each student gets what he or she worked for.
5. Don't take attendance. Students are responsible for understanding the material regardless to what they choose to do with their class times. Forced to attend, they may engage in distractive behavior during the class. Additionally, with no attendance taking they vote with their feet on the teaching methods.
6. Take a hard line on late and incomplete work. Extensions and incompletes are privileges reserved for extraordinary occasions.
7. Give students lots of options for major assignments and exams. Some students like to be creative, some prefer analytical approach. If they understand the material, either type of assignment will work well.
8. Require clear and coherent written work.
9. Combat plagiarism.
10. Get out of the way. Teaching is about setting up an environment that encourages students to explore the subject matter. When they find something that interests them, they will explore it and learn on their own.

Excellent tips. As a student and as a future teacher, I can especially relate to 1, 3, 5 and 10.

With one canceled class and an independent study instead of it the schedule of my classes is settled. This semester I’m taking Computerization in society (the name seems to be changed to "Information technology and society" in the syllabus) and "Sociology of culture" (no syllabus online). The independent study will be focused on doing research on online communities (still need to work out details.)

So far I think the classes are promising, especially the one about culture. It will be a lot of work as I already have three writing assignments for this week in addition to all the reading. Hopefully, something useful will come out at the end of the semester.

Sometimes discussions about computers and Internet give me a déjà vu feeling. As if I read about it in the sociological and cultural studies literature before. Yesterday I had such feeling with the concept of social architecture. The association might be not that obvious, so I may be just using two different ideas to develop my own. Anyways…

According to wikipedia.org, social software is a kind of software that lets people communicate and collaborate through computer networks. Using this software people create shared, interactive spaces. As I understand from the post about social architecture as the foundation of the blogosphere (see the link above), social architecture refers to a combination of components of human-computer interaction based on social software.

Three components or "social agents" are present in the blogosphere: the human creators, the human readers and the social software (machines). Humans leave social traces or "gestures" (by linking, tagging, etc.), while machines analyze the blogs to provide relevant or valued information according to users’ needs. Again, I'm not sure I understood the idea completely, but it seems that social architecture consists of humans who somehow connect and communicate and software (and hardware?) that allows them to do it. This idea (of agents, gestures and relationships) reminded me of the idea of a cultural diamond.

W. Griswold in her book "Cultures and societies in a changing world" (2003, 2nd ed.) talks about a cultural diamond that represents elements of culture and relationships between them. Four points of the diamond are cultural creators, cultural receivers, cultural objects (symbols, beliefs, values and practices) and social world (the context in which culture is created and experienced). A complete understanding of any cultural phenomenon requires understanding all four points and links between all of them.

The blogosphere as a cultural phenomenon can be represented with a blogging pentagon.

Understanding the blogosphere and its social architecture characteristics becomes clearer and richer if we take the blogging pentagon into consideration. Some points of this pentagon need further elaboration (e.g. What a blog gesture would include? Or why it's social software and not the software-hardware-networks combination) but 5 points and 10 relationships should provide a comprehensive list of emerging issues to deal with. And it should be better than the concept of social architecture because it refers directly to the blogosphere and implies multiple relationships between various elements.

If anybody is interested in political blogging, here is a report on emergence of the progressive blogosphere from the New Politics Institute. The report provides an overview of the politics of blogging and the comparison of the progressive and conservative online political communities as well as gives suggestions for involving blogs and bloggers in political campaigns.

I'd say it's a very general report but it has some insights on what's going with political blogging.