Rho Kappa - High School Social Studies Honor Society!

Way back in the last century when I was involved with the TOPSS board, several folks in that organization did quite a bit of work to get a high school psychology honor society started. There are active 2 and 4 year psych. honor societies (Psi Beta and Psi Chi). These organizations sponsor conferences, awards, and Psi Chi's Journal of Undergraduate Research is a well respected, peer reviewed publishing opportunity for undergraduate research.

The idea of a high school psychology honor society (the working code name was "psi alpha") never gained traction within the structure of the APA. However, NCSS recently announced a high school social studies honor society: Rho Kappa. There aren't many details on the website yet, but it sounds to me like this could definitely be an "umbrella" organization that a high school psychology honor society could fit under.

Anyone out there interested in starting a psych. honor society? Does anyone have one already? If you're interested, I'm pretty sure the folks in charge of the NCSS Psychology Community would be VERY interested in talking to you about Rho Kappa!

posted by Rob McEntarffer

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Your Students = Wikipedia Editors

Anyone ever edited or contributed to a Wikipedia page? I've been fascinated with Wikipedia's group editing process since I first heard about the idea, and I've always wanted to get students involved. I tried to get this rolling in my psychology club this year, but we ran into too many snags with our district's firewall. So I thought I'd share the idea with y'all and hope that some enterprising psych teacher can actually get this done.

Here was my plan: ask students to poke around in psychology topics on Wikipedia until they find a page for a psych topic (term, concept, experiment, psychologist, etc.) that seems "thin" - one that needs more information, better information, better references, etc. (My choice would have been http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Kirke_Wolfe - Wolfe deserves more than that entry!). Then your students research to fill in the gaps, write up potential revisions to the page, and submit the changes to Wikipedia. Hopefully there are other "editors" out there in Wiki-space who are monitoring that page and the students will get the experience of discussing the potential changes and going through a revision process. In the end, your students may see their work represented permanently on Wikipedia and they will be much more experienced not only in their chosen topic, but in the process of "Web 2.0" knowledge "creation" and writing.

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