Sociology Noir: A Sociological Whodunnit

Having written a not-inconsiderable number of books for a number of different publishing companies, I’ve grown tired of “The Traditional Textbook” and the Traditional Approach to teaching and learning taken by said publishing companies. Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’ve just developed a dislike to the lack of innovation, the aversion to risk-taking or even just doing something a little differently.

Anyway, mercifully free of the Publisher’s shackles, I can experiment to my heart’s content and just lately I’ve become a bit obsessed with Sociological Storytelling – the idea of trying to create a narrative around the materials students use so that rather than being passive consumers of The Textbook they take a rather more active role in the stories they’re being told.

One way I’ve tried to do this is by constructing narratives where students take-on a role – as sociological detectives – investigating various ideas. One manifestation of this has been the Crime and Deviance Gamified series. Episode 1 introduces the concepts of crime, deviance, social order and social control while Episode 2 is based around The Relativity of Crime and Deviance.

These, if you’d had a look at them, are very large, hand-crafted, PowerPoint Projects that take an inordinate amount of time to create. And while I find them interesting to construct, progress is slow.

While walking the dog the other day and thinking about how to produce materials more-quickly I thought about how I could use AI to speed-up the process. If you’ve looked at the Crime Episodes you’ll be aware that all the images I’ve used have been AI generated, mainly because it allows me to tailor the images to the demands of a particular scene, but also because I didn’t want to use any images emanating from mainstream picture publishers. Because, not to put too fine a point on things, I dislike them intensely.

The idea that popped into my head was to take material I’d already written, such as a straightforward, bog-standard, sociology-by-the-numbers book chapter and parse it through an AI chatbot to see if it could transform it into something different and potentially more-interesting.

The format I then started to develop was the idea of a murder mystery – a Sociological Whodunnit that students could solve and, at the same time, learn some Sociology. In this particular instance, an introduction to socialisation and the creation of identities.

At least, that’s the idea.

I don’t know if it will work in the way it was intended – students “learn some sociology” without necessarily realising that’s what they’re doing.

It may be a bust, but at least I thought I’d give it a go to see what happens. If you’re interested enough to play-test the file it’s called Curtain Call at the Lantern.

And if you’ve any comments or suggestions for improvements I’d be glad to hear them.