Hello, my name is Steve Joordens and I am a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. My primary areas of research expertise include human memory, consciousness, and the creation and evaluation of technologies to support education. In addition to my research I teach our very large (i.e., 1500 student) Introductory Psychology class, and beginning in the Summer of 2012 I will also teach a course called WikiScholar, a course specifically focused on having students create and edit Wikipedia pages related to Psychological phenomena. I'm very excited about that course, and it's honestly the reason I am here right now. Since learning more about Wikipedia as a teaching tool I've decided to also allow students in my Intro class to earn bonus marks by making slight edits to existing psychology-related pages, preferably while also replicating any article they modify in another version of Wikipedia that supports a language they know (virtually all my students are multilingual and they come from literally across the globe).
I am also co-creator, with my Ph.D. student Dwayne Pare, of an internet based learning technology called peerScholar. peerScholar uses peer-assessment to support the development of meta-cognitive skills in any size classroom, and it won the 2009 National Technology Innovation Award. Many of the cognitive processes exercised within peerScholar are also exercised when students perform Wikipedia-based assignments, so now Wikipedia is becoming a new focus of my teaching and research.
Oh, for fun, I play guitar and sing in a "working stiffs" rock band named Delusions of Grandeur, and whenever the weather is nice I love to ride my 2007 Ducati Multistrada 1100.
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