The European Union (EU) has been in the news a lot recently, mostly due to the financial problems of some of its member states. While these reports about the EU’s economy are interesting and the subject matter is important, students don’t always care much for the fine details of international economics. Despite the convenience of being able to travel with just one currency through the Eurozone, to many students the EU seems one big opaque mess: countries bailing each other out and welfare states under pressure, while heads of government are, well, butting heads. For professors charged with teaching the EU, the problems may lie more in the fact that the EU is rife with procedures, institutions, and processes that are tedious and sometimes downright boring to explain.

To make the EU more approachable to students and to lighten up the often technical discussions of how the EU “works,” maps come in handy and provide interesting information.  For example, EUpedia’s maps of Europe contain information like the legal status of cannabis in EU member countries and the legal age to drink alcohol. Such facts are not only likely to capture the interest of students who are planning a backpacking trip or a study abroad program in Europe, but also illustrate two crucial points about the EU: first, that a lot of diversity exists among the EU member countries; second, and related, that the EU does not regulate everything within the boundaries of its member countries.

A good tool for students to brush up on their geographic knowledge of Europe is this interactive map with 48 questions prompting students to identify countries. It provides immediate feedback and keeps track of the score. The map provided by nationsonline also has rudimentary information about all countries. The BBC’s interactive map is paired with a timeline of major events in the EU’s history. Together, these websites add some interesting facts and provide visual help that makes studying the EU more fun.

Speaking as an editor with a traditional college publishing background, I can tell you that I’ve always considered the legislative process coverage in American Government texts to be the toughest section for an author to tackle. And the artwork intended to illustrate the process, which invariably takes up an entire page of textbook real estate, rarely helps matters.

Enter Sunlight Labs, an offshoot of The Sunlight Foundation, whose Design for America contest has resulted in some truly rich infographics showing how a bill becomes a law. The post summing up the contest results is here. The six entries are here and all are downloadable. Mike Wirth’s winning entry, which features what Nathan Yau at FlowingData describes as boardgame-like, has been featured on a number of go-to sites for quality infographics, including Good, Cool Infographics, and The Infographics Showcase.

Newsy.com is a startup headquartered across the street from the Missouri Journalism School that is betting that a curatorial approach to video-based media stories is the way to ensure unbiased coverage.

This post from ReadWriteWeb gives an overview on the company’s founder, business model, and approach– specifically it’s off-to-the-races iPad app. A quick browse through Newsy’s site yields a range of short video clips that explore U.S. and global news stories like congressional efforts to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and fraying relations between North and South Korea. And then there are the slightly more frivolous stories ranging from partisan attacks to frog invasions.

Newsy’s structure of piecing together clips from a range of news sources and then posing a question dodges any useful journalistic attempt at analysis, but if used as a discussion launcher or a starting point for a more in-depth exploration of a given topic, these clips should be a useful tool in the classroom.

George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs sponsors a rich array of events devoted to world affairs. Now, a Multimedia Center on the school’s website allows faculty and students to experience and learn from events they could not attend in person. In the school’s own words:

The Elliott School’s Web Video Initiative capitalizes on our robust events program that brings hundreds of scholars, policymakers, diplomats, journalists, and other world leaders to the GW campus each year. Our goal is to share our extraordinary on-campus resources with the broader community to advance understanding of important international issues.

Program topics include U.S. – China economic relations, the implications of Nuclear Weapon-Free Zones, foreign policy challenges in Africa and Latin America, global women’s issues, and many more.

Public Agenda is a nonpartisan non-profit that seeks to bridge “the gap between American leaders and what the public really thinks about issues … in American life.”

Public engagement and the need to grapple respectfully with tough issues are key threads running throughout the materials on the Public Agenda website. Their Citizen’s Survival Kit covers a host of high-profile policy issues and features the tag line “Get the Facts. Consider the Choices. Stay Involved”– a good blueprint for informed civic engagement of any sort. A particularly salient policy issue in light of Arizona’s tough new stance and the upcoming midterm elections is immigration. Public Agenda includes an issue guide on the subject as well as the results of a survey in which legal and illegal immigrants were asked about their attitudes toward life in the United States.

Energy policy is another area of emphasis on Public Agenda’s website. This page provides case studies of foreign nations held up as alternative energy exemplars and provides a host of class discussion points.

And for anyone worried enough about the federal deficit to want to watch it increase on a real-time basis, you can find a National Debt Clock widget here to add to any web page. (Yes, that’s it below.)

Pretty much everyone is in agreement that happiness is a great thing. This time of year, I’m sure many academics and students feel a temporary sense of happiness when finals are over and summer begins… or at least is close to beginning. But what about the non-students and non-academics out there? What makes them happy?

Studies of happiness in cross-national comparison abound. Depending on which survey and which year you are looking at, the Danes are the happiest people in the world – or the Costa Ricans, or the Nigerians. What makes the citizens of these nations happy? Again, that depends on which report you read: economic security in Denmark, the lack of an army and an emphasis on sustainability in Costa Rica, and the absence of materialism in Nigeria.

Bringing happiness to the political science classroom certainly makes for great discussion. For research methods classes, happiness studies lend themselves to discussions of variables, measurement, hypotheses, and cross-national comparisons. In political theory classes, students might wonder what the links are between different types of political systems and happiness – for example, is it true that “democracy makes people happy?”  Given the wave of democratization in the last few decades, this is an interesting question.

In comparative politics classes, we might take up the issue of research design and comparability: how well do concepts such as “happiness” with their subjective and cultural connotations travel across different countries and regions of the world? Political economy courses might study the correlations between economic systems or indicators and national happiness.

Here are a few happiness websites you might want to explore (many others only require a Google search):

The World Values Survey describes Ronald Inglehart’s study,  according to which happiness has increased over time in most countries where data are available. The website also provides access to the data on which the study was based. The Happiness Show discusses two different ways in which studies have measured happiness, resulting in different rankings: if people are just asked how happy they are, Nigeria emerges as the winner, but if satisfaction with life is also included, Puerto Rico ranks first (Zimbabwe has the lowest score).

Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times Op Ed speculates on the reasons why Costa Ricans are the happiest people on earth. In this 60 Minutes piece, Morley Safer presents a tongue-in-cheek take on Denmark as happiest country. This Bloomberg Businessweek article on global happiness suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that money still matters.

And then there’s this Map of World Happiness created by Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at the the University of Leicester:

One of the things I enjoy most about the MPSA is the chance to meet and speak with people I may have only communicated with by phone or e-mail. So when Kiki Caruson of the University of South Florida came by Soomo’s booth to introduce herself in person, it was sort of like having a long-lost cousin drop in for a visit. A lively discussion broke out in the midst of demoing Americans Governing, and I discovered that Kiki is secretly a number-cruncher at heart…and knows, well, people we already consider friends of Soomo. Like Phillip “Hutch” Pollock, the author of our Statistical Analysis and Politics assignments. (Okay, they both teach in Florida and the academic world doesn’t need to play 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon in order to connect the kinship dots– but, still, it was fun!)

In addition to knowing how to discuss research methods and statistical software in a way that doesn’t cause my throat to close up, Kiki shared an online simulation site that has worked well in her classes.

LegSim.org allows instructors to incorporate a class-wide, online legislative simulation into their courses for a fee of $12 per student enrolled. Simulations based on the U.S. House of Representatives, state legislatures, and the European Union are available on the site. And it’s easy to get a feel for how this simulation might work in your own course via a virtual tour as well as a test drive that gives you a clear understanding of what a student will experience.

Spring is in full swing in Asheville, but Soomo is in full conference mode. We’ve packed up our gear (again) and are in Chicago for the 68th Annual MPSA National Conference April 22-25!

Soomo has set up shop in the exhibit hall, booth #504. Come by, say hello, check out our original videos and online assignments, and grab a few pieces of chocolate for the road.

We are hosting a workshop, “Build Your Online Course in 15 Minutes,” on Thursday, April 22, from 10:30 am – 12:00 pm in the Wrigley Room. Our Editorial and Political Science Desk teams will be on hand ready to help arrange your course to meet your needs for upcoming semesters.

Also on Thursday at 4:35 pm on the Teaching and Learning in an International Context panel, our own Zara Ricks and David Lindrum and Professor Kevin Cooney of Northwest University are presenting a paper titled, “What Do We Teach When We Teach IR? -
a search for our de facto canon of ideas and content to be included in the intro course, pursued through comparative analysis of leading IR textbooks.”

Soomo will be conducting another workshop, “How I Use the Web,” on Saturday, April 24, at 12:45 pm in the Empire Ballroom (on the Lobby floor) with Professors Tressa Tabares of American River College, Lilly Goren of Carroll University, and Chapman Rackaway of Fort Hays State University. They will discuss how they are integrating online resources into their courses, and share what they’ve learned about getting the most out of web resources without a lot of hassle.

We conclude our jam-packed schedule with David Lindrum chairing the Approaches to Undergraduate Research panel on Saturday, April 24, at 4:35pm.

As always, safe travels and see you in the Windy City!

If you think that your students’ work sometimes looks familiar, or you find that students turn their work in very early (or alternatively, very late), there are many reasons that could explain this. Perhaps new generations of students are smarter, or work more diligently and efficiently. But online “sharing” sites now available to students may also be the answer.

You may already submit your students’ papers to turnitin or similar services to check whether it is original work or has been “recycled” and to provide a disincentive to students tempted to plagiarize. But you might not be aware of other online services that provide students with the opportunity to upload and “share” assignments with other students and, in return, download assignments that other students have previously submitted. In fact, “swapping” assignments is mandatory for some of these websites: you can download other students’ submissions only if you upload something else in return. Thus, while in the past many professors objected to their notes, handouts, and assignments being circulated by students in fraternity or sorority houses or being circulated in paper form commercially, existing online services allow students to exchange teaching materials and assignments in a virtual environment.

Participants in the technology track of APSA’s 2010 Teaching and Learning Conference pointed to two such online services available to students. Course Hero is a “social learning network” that promises “less work, better grades” by offering over 6 million study materials including syllabi, essays, lectures, and exams, and 500,000 textbook solutions, among other resources.

Another such student “resource” is koofers.com, which allows students to share notes and makes previous exams and study guides available. Koofers’ website states that it is “a social learning company transforming higher education through student-driven, intercollegiate collaboration.” In the koofers universe, collaboration is thus taken out of the classroom and the supervision of the instructor, and assignments that professors might expect students to complete on their own are now easily converted into “collaborative” experiences.

On these websites, students have discussions about whether lecture notes and exams have changed from one semester to the next, what the assignments are likely to be like, and provide examples of previous papers for a course. The problems with these online services are obvious and numerous. From a professor’s perspective, copyright infringement is just one of them. Note that when class material is copyrighted and professors complain, most of these services will remove the copyrighted material. Apparently it is time to copyright any handouts, exams, and lecture notes that you will be posting online in order to protect intellectual property and maintain the integrity of our classes. But this is just a first step since it is apparently now the responsibility of the instructor to check where course materials have been posted and to be vigilant in ensuring that they be removed.

When I came to my current position, I was excited because every classroom was a smart classroom and as we have all discovered… smart classrooms change the way we teach. We can use brief video clips, show a copy of the front page of the newspaper, integrate a great website, respond to student questions with real-time data… all on the fly.

The spring of my first year at Jackson State University (Mississippi), all of the projectors were stolen out of the classrooms in my building during spring break and we could not replace them. The overhead projectors were long gone and we were left with blackboards and document projectors/VCRs/CD players that were all dressed up and had no place to go. Eventually each department was provided with a portable projector they could wheel to classes, but in my department there are three or four of us who compete for the technology. So now I must plan ahead. I don’t know about you, but although I plan ahead it often is to no avail.

In the fall semester I tried several times to integrate some wonderful on-line videos, some streaming Court arguments, and a couple powerpoint presentations (not out of habit, but towards a very specific pedagogical end!) None of these attempts worked out the way I expected. My colleague’s laptop did not have a large enough buffer to allow the oral argument to stream; so, first they fell out of sync—to great hilarity for the students—and then, after a total of 10 minutes, ceased to play. (The class groaned: isn’t that a measurable sign of student engagement?)

Another classroom has spotty wireless coverage and the network was absent the day the video was to air. The “portable” speakers, in another class, hummed so loudly that the students couldn’t hear the video.  And finally, and most embarrassingly, when I went to show a powerpoint on my computer, I did not reset the “sleep” mode to a length suitable for a discussion with visuals. So my laptop kept shutting down, forcing me to sprint to the machine to awaken it—not so funny the tenth time (it took me about that long to recognize the problem—I was in the groove of the topic). I am convinced these setbacks (or at least I tell myself this) are making me “logistically flexible” and capable of making anything a “teaching moment”—that rationale is better than feeling like a klutz in the classroom.

This semester I have learned from these failings and am better prepared: I have bought an adapter for my Mac so that I can use it and its endless buffer; found a speaker that simply plugs into the USB ports and still projects to the back of the classroom; and I now test everything out at home before I present. My teaching may be a little less spontaneous, but the classroom is even more of an adventure than before!

Am I the only one or is anyone else gaining logistical flexibility through their experiences with technology?