cognitive psychology

Hi! My name is Chuck Robertson (aka prof_chuck) and I am a cognitive / lifespan developmental / experimental psychologist.

I work at a liberal arts college in the foothills of the north Georgia Mountains called NGCSU (stands for North Georgia College and State University… way to much to say).

I often find myself teaching intro psych, cognition, statistics, and in the spring, the psychology of aging. In doing those tasks, I frequently torture my students by incorporating technology into the process. This site is one example.

The purpose of this blog is to have a central place to collaborate and build our knowledge of cognitive psychology as we work together over the course of the semester. Here’s the rough outline for the social bookmarking project:

Individual students work to find websites that help them understand concepts that both I and the textbook failed to make clear. Alternatively, students work alone to satisfy their curiosity by learning more about a topic that interests them. When they find good sites, they tag them on del.icio.us. We use one common tag (cog3310) for our class (they are encouraged to use as many tags as they see fit for their own private use). This allows us to find and share all the websites we’ve found, even if they are not shared in step #2 below. (Here is the feed for shared tag: http://del.icio.us/tag/cog3310)

Students then share (by commenting) at least two of their sites with the class for each chapter that we cover together. Now we should have a rich page for each chapter, full of valuable content, that has been filtered by human minds to supplement our topic(s). We are collaborating!

Finally, students are asked to review at least two of the shared sites before taking the exam over that material. This is very important as a study aid for the exam and it should save the student time. The sites that are available for them to review should cover the variety of topics on the exam and they should have been filtered for quality. Thus, one should find meaningful answers more quickly than using a traditional search engine.

In addition, I feel comfortable calling this an information literacy exercise. One other aspect that I am having my students work on as they are also working toward becoming writers, using APA style, is to think about referencing. When they review each of the sites I am asking them to think about where it would be appropriate to cite that site. It is almost always inappropriate for an academic paper (term paper), but where would it be appropriate??? oral presentation… workshops… classroom… poster presentation… where and when do we use these relatively new forms of resources that typically have not been peer-reviewed.

Feel free to remix this idea or contact me for collaboration.

You can find lots of ways to contact me on my website… click here to go there.