New course proposals

The following new course proposals have been submitted to the Faculty Senate Office for review and approval and are listed here for faculty review and comment. Comments on any new course proposal should be submitted to Ernest May, secretary of the Faculty Senate, at senate@senate.umass.edu.

SOCIOL 351, “Social Networks” 4 credits; Instructor: Ryan Acton; This is an undergraduate-level introductory course on social networks. This course provides an introduction to the fundamental concepts, methods, applications, and analytical tools of social network analysis. In addition, students will receive hands-on experience learning and using the R statistics or programming environment in order to work with social network data. No prior experience with R, statistics, or programming languages is assumed, although such experiences will like prove useful. Prerequisites: 100-level Sociology course

SOCIOL 352, “Media, Technology and Society” 4 credits; Instructor: Jonathan Wynn; Media and technology are all around: E-mail, RV, Microsoft, Google, blogs, magazines, and phones shape the world we live in and ourselves. Yet, save for the occasional computer crash or brief Y2K scare (remember that?), we rarely think critically about technology. What is progress? How does technology change our intimate friendships and identities as well as larger societal forces like education and democratic governing? As student of the social world, sociologists must ask these kinds of questions. But we also rarely think about how technology and media shape how sociologists collect data, analyze it, and re-present it to others. This course will help to develop a critical perspective on media, technology, and society. Prerequisites: 100-level Sociology course