 Hi, this is Salva Torpobonis with an orientation to Sociology 2000 Global Social Problems. Today I'm going to run you through the website and how the online class will work throughout the semester. I'll also highlight the first week's material, starting the week of March 5th. So first, this is what your blackboard should look like. Now, obviously, I'm not a student, so I can't show you what it looks like as a student. I can show you what it looks like with my student preview mode on. So that's how I, as an academic, am able to see your view of the blackboard site. So your blackboard site should look something like this, depending on your personal settings, and the page should default to the Announcements section of Global Social Problems. Now, each week I will announce the material for that week, and I'll also give some little tips about things going on in the news. This initial announcement just has a link, for example, to an article on Al Jazeera, and I won't play the video, but this is a really great little two or three minute video that introduces a lot of global social problems of the sorts we're going to be studying this semester. So I will encourage you to have a look at it. I am, for this orientation, though, going to focus first on the Outline and Welcome section of the blackboard site. It starts with a personal welcome video, and if you click through, you'll find this video that most of you have already watched, the charming video with the Laura Keats in the background. Oh, and there's me with my mouth open, all right. There's also a unit introduction video, again, just click through, and you'll find the video there. That just goes through the Univ. Study Outline and some basic information about the class. Something I do have to highlight, and it's very important right at the beginning, is this slide you can download, and mine is not set to automatically open, yours may be. But this is a slide from Disability Services asking if you have a disability, and if you do have a disability, it asks you to contact Disability Services. Now, obviously, that's something for you to consider if you want to contact Disability Services for any of these sorts of problems, and they give an alphabetical list of a couple dozen sort of typical problems that can be handled by Disability Services. The important point here is that you don't have to have a disability to receive help from Disability Services. So for example, if you're suffering from cancer, cancer is not a disability, it's a terrible disease, but you may benefit from the services available from Disability Services even though you don't have a disability as such. So as the slide emphasizes, the Disability Discrimination Act is broad and includes temporary or chronic medical conditions, physical or sensory disabilities, psychological conditions, and learning disabilities. I especially want to encourage you to get in touch with Disability Services if you are suffering from any severe psychiatric illness, including depression, which is an illness that can be accommodated through the Disability Services available at the university. So I'll leave that to you to contact Disability Services at sydney.edu.au slash disability, and there's a phone number there on the slide. So that slide is on the Blackboard site as the third item here, important announcement about Disability Services. You can also from the Blackboard site join the Sociology 2000 Facebook group, and here you can connect not only with the, I want you to update the cover photo, not only can you interact with the current students in the class, but you could even interact with students who've taken the class in the last two years. So you're welcome to join that group. I emphasize membership is entirely optional, and I want to emphasize that it's just a convenient way to meet people in the class, set up discussions, meetups, whatever you want. Absolutely no class content or participation credit will be mediated through Facebook. I don't even moderate the group. I just set up the group as a facility. If you want to join it, it's there for you. Feel no obligation. There's also a YouTube playlist for the class. Now the YouTube playlist will include all the lectures for the class. It's going to build week by week. The first lecture is my welcome video. The second video lecture is the unit of study outline 2018 edition, and the video you're watching right now is going to become the third video in that series. After that, we'll follow the week one material, week two material, week three material, etc. Now although all the lecture material will be built into the playlist, you will still have readings and tutorial material, so you can't just watch the playlist as the entire class. But it is convenient to have a YouTube playlist because each week when the lectures are released on Monday, you can just go to the playlist and play all and have all the lectures play for you right there on your desktop or on your phone without you having to do any work to go to the Blackboard site. If you just want to binge watch all the lectures for each week, just as you would in a regular lecture, if you were to go to a real classroom every Monday at 2 p.m., you would two hour binge watch some lecture or giving lectures. In the same way, you can two hour binge watch sociology 2000 every week by going to the YouTube playlist. I've also included some links here to things like my personal website at SalvatoreBugonis.com where if any of you want to find some of my popular writing, it's all collected here or you can find me on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or subscribe to my newsletter or anything like that, it's all here on my website. I'd also like to encourage you, only if you're interested, there's absolutely no requirement but if you'd like to hear from me once a month, not just during this class but in the future it's a good way to stay in touch, subscribe to my newsletter. I put out a newsletter about once a month covering global Asia and you can always resign from the newsletter if you're not interested in it but it's just there if you'd like to sign up, you're very welcome to. Again, absolutely no obligation and no class material will be delivered via the newsletter. Here you will find a link finally to the unit of study outline as you probably are aware these are now delivered all online at the University of Sydney and you have to log in with your uni key to access the unit of study outline. And once you log in, hopefully the systems are working better and faster for you than they are for me and you can find the unit of study outline which I've already gone through in the unit of study outline class introduction video but there you go, it's there online. Alright so that's the outline and welcome section. You'll probably want to go through that once and then you're through with it forever. Much more important for doing well in the class is to go to the weekly assignments section. Now here every week you will see a list of what to do that week and each week on Monday or to be honest usually on Sunday night I'll put up a folder that's that week's material you'll see the week one material is already up and you'll see go and go means that week's folder is ready for you to hop in there and do your work for the week each week's material is divided into three sections it's very simple every week you watch the lectures you read the reading material and you do the tutorial work and as an illustration for week one you'll see there's a watch section in which you can watch the lectures. Lectures are nicely organized A, B, C, D, E, F in order these are the same order they'll appear in the YouTube playlist you'll note that the video I'm currently recording is not yet there it will be by the time you go to the watch section so first thing you do every week watch the videos for the week and there's just a short description of what each video is now each week I'll have the spoke content for the class that is videos I actually record as my lectures for the class these will be the beginning lectures but then I'll also have some outside material so for example in the week one of material I have two videos on the global social problem of the week which is left behind children in China and you know one is a short video of six minutes from Wall Street Journal and the other is a longer video of 13 minutes from Shenhua China's official news agency. The easiest way to get the watch material done is just to go to the YouTube playlist and play all. Alternatively you can go in through Blackboard and you have one by one play each of the videos. Note that I also post these slides so wherever there are PowerPoint slides associated with a lecture you'll see they're key to the lecture conveniently keyed by letter so this orientation includes this slide 1a which is the disability slide the second lecture in the week one series on proto-global problems has a slide set 1b and it's lecture b and you can download the lectures use them for to help you study for the exams you know they're there for you as a resource okay in addition to watching there is a read section and each week I'd like you to read a set of material for the class beginning right now in week one of the March 5th class the week beginning March 5th now each week I'll have short readings that I actually expect you to read and that's the deal for this class I'm not going to give you a list of you know eight journal articles and book chapters that I like you to read but I know no one is going to instead I'm going to give you just a small number of easy readings but I want you to actually do them and I will test you on them so for example this week's readings are a short reading about left behind children from Xinhua again that's China's official news agency and as you'll see it's truly a short reading you know only about five hundred words maybe six hundred words so it should be really easy just gives you the background I've also assigned you to do a Google news search for a recent news item on left behind children in China let's educate yourself that's easy enough to do you just go to news.google.com and Google something like China left behind children and I'd like you to pick one you don't have to pick the first one I'd like you to pick one think about it just better inform yourself about the problem of left behind children get up to date and then there'll be an additional problem of the week reading so this problem is again on left behind children and it explains the Hukou household registration system Hukou is a Chinese word that refers to people's the requirement that people should register their residency with the authorities and they're only technically entitled to government services in the place where they're registered so if you're from a rural village and you're registered in that village you can go live in Shanghai but your kids can't go to school in Shanghai you can't get social services in Shanghai you don't have medical insurance in Shanghai because all of your services are tied to your place of registration and that Hukou system is explained here at a background briefing from the council on foreign relations on China's internal migrants and I've asked you in particular to think about how the Hukou system affects discrimination against women and how it might be a particularly impact on gender discrimination so it's just again something to think about okay and finally there is a tutorial section tutorial material do these are things you're going to do every week now tutorials don't start until week two but in week one I absolutely need you to do one simple little thing I just need you to press on this button and sign in just enter your uni key specifically your uni key mine is Espo bonus and your password and once you've done that enter the uni key and password click log in and then you can log out again it doesn't matter I just need you to log in and that's because of the strange facts of the university's IT systems we can't find you in the video conferencing software the adobe connect video conferencing software that we use for tutorials until you have initialized your account by logging into adobe connect so we just need you to log in once I promise you we're not scamming you we're not stealing your passwords as you can see this is an official University of Sydney system you said edu.au but through the well through the magic of the University of Sydney we're unable to manually make you eligible for the weekly tutorials we have to have you log in in order to make your own account visible to us so that we can add you to the tutorial groups so please go ahead and do that this week by Thursday night at the latest when I say this week I mean the week of March 5th by Thursday night at the latest now in future weeks under tutorial material do you'll see more interesting things to do with your fellow tutorial mates but that'll come in week two and three we'll build up to it week two we won't actually have full tutorials running because we'll still be setting up the tutorial groups so you'll have a tutorial activity that won't involve the other members of your tutorial team week three you'll be with teams and you know set and going so look forward to that that's really the heart of this online unit or the online tutorials and let me just say one final thing about that when I decided to put this class online the goal for me was not just to take you know my regular boring lectures and put them online the goal for me was to completely redesign a class to make it a digital native class a class that was designed so that it would be online and to use online tools to do something better than what we can do with a hundred students in a lecture hall and 25 students in each tutorial so the heart of this class is that the tutorials are actually six student activity teams not 25 student sessions where everybody just sits there trying to be quiet and you know not be noticed if there are a lot of fun and I've had great feedback about the tutorials so you know I'm telling you I'm really excited about this class I'm really excited to do a digital native class that works for the online age not just take up you know boring old lecture class and record the lectures I'm going to keep the lectures up to date we're going to be constantly adding new material throughout the semester if you have something you're particularly interested in email me and I'll see if I can work it into the class but you know most of all you enjoy those tutorials get involved in those tutorials and I'm really looking forward to getting started with it you know we can't start with it immediately we have to get the technology up and running but by week three we'll be up and running in tutorial groups and having a lot of fun with it all right that's it for me thanks for listening and I do hope you enjoy the class