The first site I added for this week was the American Psychology and Law Society. The organization's goal is to advance the understanding of law and legal institutions through basic and applied psychological research, and for this, parallels the intent of Grey Matters. However, the actual website is somewhat limited in available information without membership. The site's student section is a selling point, offering resources concerning internships, fellowships, grants, research, clinical training, and more, yet the visual design of this section is unappealing, rough, and uninspired. The Association for Psychological Science website is a very well organized collection of some of the most interesting psychology articles, an exhaustive link section, and journal access. The site is easily navigable and incorporates descriptive visuals for many of the article topics. Crime Library's The Criminal Mind website is perhaps the most entertaining and enjoyable place to visit on my linkroll. The site would earn high marks in all criteria sections for the Webby Awards; the content communicates a large body of knowledge in an engaging easily accessible manner; the functionality is superb, integrating interactive quizzes based on crime stories with multiple chapters and quick loading despite ample eye candy. Although being associated with a television station, the site's overall experience leaves you enlightened and does not come off as transplanted material from television of magazine. Psychology Today is the magazine of the same name's website but it is by no means an electronic version of the magazine. Exceeding the Crime Library's level of interactivity, Psychology Today offers dozens of online tests from coping skills to IQ, with immediate feedback to facilitate an informative experience. One
of the site's main purposes is to provide help and resources to those in need, which it does very well. All About Forensic Psychology is a toss up when it comes the quality of the site. While a comprehensive bank of information can be found here in a style and language accessible to the layperson, finding what you are looking for might be cumbersome. An unorganized but extensive list of topics can be found on the left side of the main page, and following any one of these links will lead you to good info fragmented by ugly advertising and poor layout. Despite these drawbacks, this site is worth exploring.PsyBlog, Maintained by a freelance writer and psychology graduate student, has gained gained a lot of attention through its stylistic use of the post miniseries, such as the "7 sins of memory", which unfold as multiple posts over a week or so. The blog's influence is recognizable by its high technorati authority rating along with a four year archive. The Innocence Project's Innocence Blog deals almost exclusively with current news related to psychological research on the fallibility of eyewitness identification of which I posted on a few weeks back. The blog is updated daily and its authority is of the highest on the topic. Wer're Only Human is affiliated with the Association for Psychological Science and takes a casual approach to psychology concepts but is written very well with good flow. The posts focus on everyday applications of the field and consequently has some highly engaging things to share. My only critique of the site is that it is too blue in color. In The News is a blog written by a PH.D. about forensic psychology, criminology, and law. A forensic psychologist in profession, the author bases her posts on current events and articulates an opinion through peer reviewed research. Although a bit biased against the legal system and media, the content of this blog is too important and relevant to dismiss. The final website I added to my linkroll was one that does this sort of work for me. PsychSplash is a blog maintained by a PH.D. in clinical psychology who's passion for everything psychology overflows in the effort he puts into exploring the web for psychology related websites. The blog reviews a new site everyday and describes who its audience would be, the topics it concerns itself with, and the features the site contains. Besides being a great resource for anyone interested in psychology, the blog's visual design is playful and very appealing.
1 comment:
To begin with, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your new post about the explorations of the web. The web can be a daunting place to find reliable and knowledgeable sources; therefore, your entry truly shows that you put in a lot of time and effort into offering outstanding sources to your readers. While your readers obviously benefit from this exercise, so does your topic of interest, which is analyzing law enforcement and psychology.
Your talent for the written word encouraged me to take note of the subject and to venture over to the linkrolls and to begin to explore these sites in more detail. I agree with you, PsyBlog is a fascinating source. I think I may actually begin visiting this site on a regular basis. In this light, you did a great job of giving readers a preview of what is to be expected from these various sites. You took note of the positive and the negative, while maintaining a careful, observant eye of the Webby and the IMSA criteria. Furthermore, you did a great job of narrowing down the linkrolls to incorporate governmental and non-governmental sites. Your topic of interest must have thousands upon thousands of options; nevertheless, you tried to incorporate different sites of various magnitudes. It is refreshing to see that you managed to come across such an exceptional blog, PsyBlog.
Even though the entry is mostly eloquent and focused, there could have been smoother transitions from one site to next. Most times than not, there are no transitions. I understand that there is a limited amount of time and space in which your primary goal is to push readers to venture on to the sites and explore them on their own time, but it would have been more helpful to have compared/contrasted one site to the next to show further mastery of the sources. Regardless, this minor point of weakness does not take away from the work hard that you put in. Continue the great. I look forward to future entries.
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