As I teach Social Psychology at Carroll for the last time, I welcome feedback from former students, former Ohio State social psychology classmates and professors, fellow social psychologists, and present students about what should be taught in the courses and how it should be taught. I have always been impressed by the under heralded contributions of Scott Plous in his creation of the Social Psychology Network. Thank you, Scott, for your many contributions and your rekindling my interest in the discipline. There are so many social psychologists whom I continue to admire and learn from, even if vicariously.
I’ve invited my students to visit the SPN network as a starting point.
In addition, I have revisited Mahzarin Banaji’s original call for an APS Wikipedia Initiative , become an APS Wikipedia Fellow, and am having my students participate in the Wiki Education foundation program under my aegis.
So much to learn and to share. I welcome your comments and feedback about how to give the fundamental principles and ideas of social psychology away and to make the world a better place.
I am really impressed by the SPN website. The Joe Chemo was fascinating to go through showing how Tabaco companies try to manipulate the public. I am also very excited to start working on the APS Wikipedia Project with the whole class. As many of the comments have mentioned, throughout my high school career, I was told to not use this resource at all. However, in college, there has been a different perspective on Wiki by having it be a sufficient starting point. This was interesting to me to see this change. Being able to contribute to a website that almost everyone knows of is really exciting for me. This will also be an interesting alternative to learning valuable information about the Social Psychology field.
Clearly Scott Plous has invested a lot of time in developing this resource, There is a tremendous wealth of information to discover, use, share, and act upon.
My exploring Wikipedia this semester (with and without students) is proving to be quite enlightening. i could see my devoting quite a bit of time to it even after this semester.
Social Psychology Network is a great resource and I’m very glad you introduced us to it. I look forward to trying the e- interview since it mentions the feedback is similar to human feedback. I am excited to focus on a topic in Social Psychology and create or improve a Wikipedia article about it. I had not given much thought to Social Psychology in the past and I am finding that there are many topics encompassed within it that are relevant to my everyday life and that help explain the anomalies of human behavior. The Wikipedia editing is a great new resource that I think will be a great way for students to learn Social Psychology content.
As I mentioned to Emily, at first encounter I find the SPN overwhelming. What it could use is some kind of map to guide users to the wealth of content.
There are some overlaps between some topics and specializations of Social psychology and your graduate school interests. My friend, Dr. Michelle Braun, can attest to the utility and vitality of social psychological concepts in her neuroscience work. She just published a new Psychology Today blog piece. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/high-octane-brain/201810/4-tips-enhance-daily-life-loved-one-alzheimers
I love how easy it is to navigate the Social Psychology Network website. There are a lot of tools like the Research Randomizer that I have used in other classes and for work in my internship. The tools provided all appear to be useful. I am also looking forward to working on Wikipedia with you this semester. It amazes me how far Wikipedia has come. I remember back in elementary and middle school; we were always told not to use the website. This is because the faculty did not view it as a credible website. Being young, I believed them and it stills feels weird using Wikipedia on different projects and as a starting point for research. I have never worked with editing a website. This is why I am excited to learn how to actually edit and work with a website like Wikipedia. I hope to learn through this project and help Wikipedia continue to grow.
I am amazed at how well Scott is able to “maintain” the website. It would be useful to have some kind of master map of its contents.
Wikipedia has evolved and improved across the years in large part due to dedicated volunteers. I think that it often is criticized for the wrong reasons and often by individuals who are ignorant of its history or its core guiding values.
After writing an article and having it published earlier this semester, I understand the work that goes into creating and editing. I actually was told growing up that Wikipedia should never be used for research projects and I must admit I have not worked with it much since middle school. I look forward to learning more about it and being able to change that perception by saying that I had the opportunity to work on it and I hope that at the end of the project I can walk away understanding Wikipedia better and being able to help it expand.
I find it interesting to see where Wikipedia falls in Jane Hart’s annual survey of Top Learning Tools https://www.toptools4learning.com/wikipedia/.
I’ll be interested in your insights about Scott Plous’ SPN.
I am definitely looking forward to creating and/or editing a Wikipedia page in this class! I grew up using Wikipedia as my personal primary source of quick information and have always been fascinated by the website’s rapid growth on the internet. In the past, I remember thinking that soon Wikipedia will begin charging its consumers to use it, but to my surprise that has yet to be the case. To this day, Wikipedia remains a free and open source for information and is constantly expanding and improving. Being able to contribute to its growth, even just a little bit, will be exciting!
I share your excitement. It amazes me how long it has existed and how true to its original values it has remained. It continues to be very highly rated among Jane Hart’s learning tools. I referred to it yesterday to learn more about the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khasoggi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal_Khashoggi