Category: Psychology

Responding to Jane Hart’s “10 Tools Challenge”

Recently Jane Hart has extended an interesting professional development challenge.  Make a resolution to find out how to use 10 new tools this year and write a monthly blog post describing one's experiences with the tools.Though I have been a persistent dillettante of her Top 100 Tools for Learning Lists for the past six years, this semester I have a unique opportunity (and a block of dedicated time) to focus on mastery of a subset of these tools. Hence, I accept and welcome the "challenge!" Thanks for the 'incentive", Jane!

Over the next 15 weeks six of my students and I will be working on a project to create a "virtual European immersion cultural experience course." Among the resources we will be drawing upon are

  1. Jane Hart's Social Learning Handbook (and selective updated material I shall master as a function of my joining the Top 100 Tools Club)
  2. Susan Manning and Kevin E. Johnson's The Technology Toolbelt for Teaching
  3. Laurence Peters' Global Education: Using Technology to Bring the World to Your Students
  4. Michelle Pacansky-Brock's Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies and
  5. Deltina Hay's A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization: Strategies, Tactics, and Tools for Succeeding in the Social Web

 The broad categories of tools I hope to master with my students are

Ambitious? Yes. Overly ambitious —time will tell but I am blessed with an unusually talented group of students with whom I have worked for years and who each have received a brand new Ipad to support their creation of this new course.

We welcome feedback and ideas.

 

Psychology at a Crossroads? “Lord of the Data” Revisited

My belief in the integrity of psychological science is in a dither. How unsettling it is to read so much lately about fraud, fabrication, and plagiarism conducted by prominent researchers. Ironically, a well-respected popular science writer who wrote a
thoughtful article about the increasing difficulty of replicating
effects and the declining strength of replicated findings has himself been successfully challenged for plagiarism.

One result of these egregious violations of academic integrity has been the development of a number of tools and efforts to identify the likelihood of fraudulent data and its prevalance. Major empirical efforts such as the reproducibility project are underway to attempt to replicate findings published in prominent psychology journals within the past few years. The two major American professional psychology organizations, the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science have offered suggestions about how best to put these malfeasances in context and proposed ways of reducing the likelihood of fraud.   

 It has NOW been over year since the data fabrication of the renowned Dutch experimental social psychologist Diederik Stapel formerly at Tilburg University was formally exposed. Many of his widely cited articles have been formally retracted.  The American Psychological Association has attempted to summarize the facts of the case, which has received extensive and often thoughtful consideration Inside Higher Education, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Times.

As a constructive attempt to use these events as a teaching moment, I shared with my students information about the Stapel controversy and asked them to share their responses in this forum. I invite you also to share any responses you have to the information above or to their thoughts since some of these students will become researchers in the near future.