“Anyone Can Blog” Symposium at APS….and much more to tell

This year’s APS Conference in Chicago was the best one I’ve attended. I’m told that the APS has only 17 full-time staffers, compared to hundreds for APA, but the conference moved along very smoothly. Before our symposium, no less that three different people came in to make sure we had the audiovisual equipment we needed, and there were quite a few symposia running at the same time.

It was fun to meet John Grohol, Greta and Dave Munger, and Wray Herbert in person, after all of our “virtual” conversations in the last five months or so. All are doing very creative things with their blogs.

John has somehow found time this weekend to post about Frank Schmidt’s APS Award Address, “How to detect and correct the lies that data tell.” I think Professor Schmidt would get along just fine with my dissertation advisor, Robert Rescorla. In Bob’s lab, if you graphed your data and the significance of your results didn’t just slap you in the face, no fancy statistical manipulations would be used to save the day. You scrapped your work and tried again.

Mr. F and I listened to Ed Diener’s “Teaching the new science of well-being.” Professor Diener does indeed seem to practice what he preaches, and his talk was humorous and entertaining. Mr. F and I, who consider ourselves happy people, found that we didn’t conform to ALL of the rules for happy people. Mr. F is definitely a “cup is half full” person, while I am not. On the other hand, Mr. F’s motto is that “trust must be earned,” and I get teased for thinking well of people even when the evidence does not support my opinions, like Jane Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. So I guess it evens out.

Okay, back to blogging. We will be posting the powerpoint for our presentation here shortly, after we resolve a few technical difficulties (it’s always harder to do this away from home). Our audience was enthusiastic, and asked some challenging questions, such as how far along does a paper have to be before we publicize it in our blogs? Greta Munger spoke for the group in saying that we wanted to talk about peer reviewed articles. Peer review is still such an important part of the process. Faculty members in the audience were looking for new ways to use blogs to interact with students and improve their scientific writing abilities. I’m coming home with many new ideas!

Here is our presentation!

Speaking of new ideas, Wray Herbert not only writes the “We’re Only Human” blog for the APS, but he has a whole new project called “A Day in the Life.” Here you will meet the Maxwell family in an interactive and creative website. I clicked on Peter, the dad, and read a story about how he thought he blew a performance with his band although his family thought he did great. These stories are used to illustrate psychological principles. This is quite a bold experiment for Wray and APS in their quest to put the science of psychology in the hands of the public, and I’ll be following this one to see where it goes. I cannot imagine the amount of time that this represents.

Dave Munger previewed his new project, Research Blogging, a site that “helps you locate and share academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research.” So if any of you are blogging about scientific research (not just psychology), register at Dave’s site, and your posts will soon have a much wider audience. That’s definitely on my to-do list here as the conference winds down.

Matt Hutson of Psychology Today joined us in the audience, and announced their new blog program. Psych Today is hosting over 70 new psychology blogs, after just 3 months of starting a blog program. If you want to blog about psychology, talk to Matt, and Psych Today might be able to host your blog. Their blogs cover a lot of different ground, from a blogger with Asperger’s to a forensic psychologist to an evolutionary psychologist. There is a LOT of content there, so be prepared to spend some fun time searching around.

We also had fun hanging out with the Houghton Mifflin staff at their booth. My book had a “New Edition Coming Soon” sticker on it–no pressure, no pressure. We shared a delightful dinner with outgoing APS President extraordinaire John Cacioppo and some of his marvelous students and colleagues from the University of Chicago. Mr. F was exchanging cooking tips–something about a lamb dish–with Gün Semin of the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences at the Universiteit Utrecht. John says he’s really not a chocolate fan, but Mr. F is going to send him some of his Peter’s chocolate, and the members of his lab seemed to think this was a very good idea. If this doesn’t make a person into a chocoholic, nothing will.

We were all having such a good time, plus I am selectively time-zone impaired and can never keep track of time in other places, that we actually got back to our hotel at about 1:30 a.m. Mr. F had to be up a 5 a.m. to get to the airport, and we got last minute calls from Kristin and Karen on their way to Beijing. John C. had been to Beijing recently, and had lots of great tips that we passed along to the girls. I think I had about 2 1/2 hours of sleep. My students will laugh about this–I’m always preaching no sleep deprivation to them. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on a presentation as I did this morning!

All in all, it was a great convention. Next year’s is in San Francisco, a much easier commute for us. If you attend, come by and say hello!