Gary Gereffi, Sociology, Arts & Sciences

Project Description

In Gereffi’s Marketing and Management capstone course, undergraduate students collect and analyze data involving several key North Carolina industries, helping Gereffi and his team (the Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness) create visualizations like value chains and maps for the public and highly-visible North Carolina and the Global Economy website.

CIT provided funding and support to help Gereffi and his team develop interactive visualizations for the project. These visualizations included representations of value chains using tools like Adobe Flash, and an exploration of the use of mapping tools like Google Earth to rethink the way industry data can be presented visually in a more global context.

Re-visualizing Value Chains

Gereffi and his team consulted with CIT on several possible approaches to creating more interactive and visually appealing value chain diagrams. Key challenges included considering uniform color schemes and layouts (to create a common visual language between all value chains), and finding a solution for presenting data and textual content in context within the diagram, yet without cluttering the visual representation.

Making mappable data more accessible

Google Maps and Google Earth have made it much easier to publish and share mappable data. Since much of the data collected by the Gereffi’s research team included location data, CIT worked with the team to use Google’s mapping tools to create clickable, interactive maps that could be included directly in context within  webpages on the NCGE site. The team created custom icons with colors that corresponded to the colors of different aspects of the value chain.

The same mappable data used to create the Google Maps was also used to create Google Earth files. The Google Earth “virtual globe” browser allows users more flexibility to view, sort and zoom into locations. By providing the data as Google Earth files, users in the community and industry also have greater access to the data.

The following video is an excerpt from the presentation “Everybody’s Doing It: Web-based Visualizations and Mashups in the Social Sciences” which CIT consultant Shawn Miller gave at Duke’s Visualization Forum in September 2008. In the video, Miller describes several aspects of the project, and demos some of the unpublished visualization experiments that he and the team explored. The full video is available from the Visualization Forum website.

For more information, visit the North Carolina and the Global Economy website. The site also includes videos that demo many of the key features, including the value chains, Google Maps and Google Earth.

Project Started: May 4, 2007
Funding: $11,000

Martha Reeves, Visiting Professor, Sociology

Martha Reeves received support to integrate examples of advertising/promotional campaigns (print ads, websites, podcasts, direct mail campaigns, advertising short films, etc) into her course MMS 170: Integrated Marketing Communication. Compiling such materials required student assistance for digitizing and organizing content, as well as to review materials for copyright clearance. Creating such a resource would provide the faculty member with a large collection of appropriate and available content to draw from and include in lectures, Powerpoint presentations, or even online using Blackboard.

Funding was provided for a graduate student who could collect and integrate these materials. CIT provided training and support, enabling the student to use various software, such as Picasa for photo-organization, to complete the project. Funding also resulted in the development of a compilation DVD of course materials, including digitized commercials from advertising agencies, resulting in improved organization of course resources and accessibility for students.

Project Start Date: 4/11/2006
Funding awarded: $2500

Additional Information

Poster from CIT Showcase 2007

“The class offers practical tools and instruments to use the value chain concept for real life industry analysis.” – Yerbol Orynbayev, CEO of the Center for Marketing and Analytical Research in Kazakhstan

Instead of assigning a final paper in his Organizations and Global Competitiveness course, Duke Professor Gary Gereffi has teams of students develop Web sites that analyze global industries. In a 2001 paper on Teaching Website Design in Business Classes, Gereffi explained the assignment’s goals: “integrate theory and empirical research … create, analyze and present information for a general audience (and) develop teamwork skills.” When he first gave the assignment in 2000, he never dreamed these projects might influence international policy. But they have.

Yerbol Orynbayev, a native of Kazakhstan, was a Public Policy graduate student at Duke in 2002 when he took Gereffi’s course and helped create the Vegetable Oil Industry Web site pictured below as part of an online report for Professor Gary Gereffi’s Organizations and Global Competitiveness course.

Orynbayev was so impressed with the course, that when he returned to Kazakhstan and became the country’s deputy minister for economy and budget planning, he asked Gereffi to travel to Kazakhstan during his sabbatical to help implement the country’s new economic strategy. Gereffi agreed and, as part of that work, taught a short course on industry analysis to Kazakh businessmen and government officials.

At the end of that course, the participants turned in PowerPoint presentations (similar to the Duke students’ Web sites) that analyzed various industries in Kazakhstan and proposed economic development plans. Below are two examples: Electric Power in the Oil and Gas Sector of Kazakhstan and Pipe Line Value Chain & Pipe Market Analysis.

“[Gereffi’s] class offers practical tools and instruments to use the value chain concept for real-life industry analysis,” says Orynbayev, now the CEO of the Center for Marketing and Analytical Research in Kazakhstan. “The Web site assignment is a salient example of such an instrument.”

Challenging students to create a Web site with up-to-date industry analysis “gets them into this research mode,” Gereffi says. “You’re not just absorbing material that the instructor is giving you, but you’re creating resources that can actually be useful to people.”

Support for Gereffi’s global industry Web site assignment came from Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) and a GE Foundation grant. For more examples of technology being used in the classroom at Duke, see CIT’s project examples.

Martha Reeves, Visiting Assistant Professor, Sociology

Project description

Reeves participated in a Faculty Fellows group focused on teaching large classes. This fellowship group discussed a number of techniques, described in McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers and Classroom Assessment Techniques.

Reeves explored the use of the Blackboard discussion board to obtain student feedback about their learning in the class and for student engagement. Group presentations where students explained how and why specific advertisements were effective, and team activities in which students investigated ethical issues in marketing and advertising products in specific industries. Reeves reported that the activities were successful and she would use similar activities in future classes.

Project start date: January 1, 2006
Funding awarded: $1,000

Deborah Gold, Associate Research Professor, Sociology

Project Description

Gold received funding to explore Blackboard as a means to improve access to materials and increase student participation in her course Sociology 164: Death and Dying. Using group features in Blackboard, students accessed different sets of readings based on their exposure and interests, making the course material more meaningful. Blackboard discussion boards were used to encourage student participation, while timely feedback was generated via a class service journal assignment.

Project Start Date: 05/01/04
Funding awarded: $1250