Kmfrance

Hey!

My name is Kirstie and I will be a senior Athletic Training major here at Linfield, with interests in psychology and human health and wellbeing.

Research Ideas

The following are research topics I thought would be interesting to consider as a focus for our group topic!

1. Anger management - this page also exits, but could also use more information and editing
2. Military psychiatry - this page exists, but could use serious editing
3. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - we would probably want to create a whole new article since one already exists

Peer Review

• Sept. 21: Edited Military psychology by adding a Wiki Link to the article. [1]
• Sept. 28: Edited Anger management by simply added a brief sentence about some common anger management techniques to give readers a sense of what the treatment entails. [2]
• Nov. 11: Posted a feedback comment on another groups talk page in regards to their article on Pica. [3]

Communication

• Sept. 21: Posted on the talk pages of my group members to let them know that I'd posted some potential ideas for our project on my talk page. [4], [5], [6], [7]
• Sept. 21: Posted on the professor's talk page to let her know I'd posted some potential ideas for my group's project and that I'd made edits to Military psychology. [8]
• Sept. 28: Posted on the professor's talk page to let her know I'd made edits on Anger management. [9]
• Oct. 12: Posted a tentative outline and due dates on our Bipolar II disorder project talk page and each member of the group proceeded to provide a more detailed explanation of their research objectives in the outline. [10]
• Oct. 13: Posted my own more detailed research objectives on the Bipolar II disorder talk page. [11]
• Dec. 5: Posted on a group member's talk page responding to her edits on our our project page. [12]
• Unfortunately, much of our group's communication was via email and at our weekly meetings in the library every Friday at noon.

Contributions

• Oct. 12: Posted a tentative outline and due dates on our Bipolar II disorder project talk page and each member of the group proceeded to provide a more detailed explanation of their research objectives in the outline. [13]
• Oct. 13: Posted my own more detailed research objectives on the Bipolar II disorder talk page. [14]
• Nov. 2: Posted my section of the Bipolar II disorder page, as well as resources; my section was Diagnosis. Resources are cited in the article itself.

Reflection

This past semester in PSYCH 181 has been an incredibly unique experience for me, and despite the challenges I faced, I also feel as though the challenges made me a better student and the knowledge and skills I have achieved are definitely signs of progress and success. I remember initially thinking how crazy and daunting the Wikipedia assignment seemed the first few weeks, and as we began learning to use the site, my assumptions proved to be true! I really had a hard time with Wikipedia initially…even the tutorial was like a different language to me. Each week was a struggle to complete assignments and without consistent feedback it was hard to know if I was on the right track. However, I did eventually get the hang of the site, and furthermore, I gained an understanding of Wikipedia as a source of communication and education, and I also came to know the pros and cons of this type of resource. For example, one of the great things about Wikipedia is that anyone can contribute information and there are lots of well-informed people out there to make edits and suggestions. And yet this is also one of the problems with the site—how easy it is for anyone to contribute information to a page whether it may be 100% true or not, whether it is cited or not. The idea of this project, in my opinion, was fabulous, because I was motivated to contribute my best work since I knew it would be utilized and critiqued by others. But unfortunately, it felt very disorganized throughout the entire semester and at this point, I have no idea where I stand in regards to my grade or if my work has been sufficient. There were few guidelines, criteria, and feedback. I do believe that my group worked together very well though, and we made it a point to get together every week on Fridays to take a few minutes to discuss our project and what needed to be done the following week. We distributed the work evenly and everyone did what they said they were going to do and contributed to the final page. We communicated via email and face-to-face more than we communicated via Wikipedia, but we were still really efficient and everyone was diligent about responding or notifying the group via email if they had a conflict of question. It was challenging at first to work with people I’d never met before since we didn’t know each other’s schedules or study skills, but we quickly adjusted and I will be honest, it did help to have a common mode of communication in Wikipedia, and there were enough group and individual assignments that we didn’t have to coordinate with everyone for every assignment. If I were to do this assignment again, I would request more guidelines and in-class Wikipedia tutorial sessions. It took a lot of extra time to simply learn how to use the site, which could have been valuable time spent on the actual articles themselves and actually collecting data and resources. I'm glad I learned to use the site though, and it is exciting to know that my group's ambitions contributed to something so much bigger than just a research paper. This information is accessible to the general public and I enjoy being able to share what I have learned.

My sandbox