User:Dandres19

About Me
I am in the class Introduction to Abnormal Psychology this fall. I will participate in the class project which involves editing the wiki created by our professor.

See Abnormal Psychology Class Project for more information.

Intro to Abnormal Psychology Assignment
The point of this project is to research a topic related to abnormal psychology and then write an article on that topic, or expand an existing article that is already on Wikipedia. This project will also help expand my knowledge of wikis and of how to use Wikipedia. I also plan to use this page as a way to keep track of my progress on this project.

Portfolio
I have chosen to include the items required for the portfolio assignment in a week-by-week list format. This assignment began during week 2 of the semester, which is why the week numbers and list numbers do not match. Dandres19 (talk) 00:10, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Contributions:

1. Week 2: I created this account page, linked to my sandbox, and signed onto the class page.

2. Week 3: I wrote on a classmate's user talk page User_talk:Mgreen1. I also made a minor edit [1] to this article Tap dance.

3. Week 4:I evaluated the article on Cognitive_disorder for the assignment due Week 4, linked my user page on my group members' talk pages, and I am interested in these topics for the group article: 4. Week 5: My group and I are undecided about topics, here is a possibility: Polysubstance_dependence. I added sentences to that article, here are the changes: change diffand here is the change diff 2. I also added suggestions to that same article's talk page. here
 * Dendrophobia (no Wikipedia article exists, currently).
 * Haptodysphoria (no Wikipedia article exists, currently).
 * Healthy multiplicity (This term is mentioned in Hypostatic model of personality, as a synonym, so it appears that our group could add on to that article.

5. Week 6: We decided to expand the article on Polysubstance dependence.

6. Week 7: We created our project proposal on the Polysubstance dependence discussion page.

7. Week 8: I began researching for articles with material that could be discussed in the article.

8. Week 9: I continued researching and began adding information and sources to the article. Here is an example, see diff.

9. Week 10: The group discussed how to complete a particular section and decided to divide it up into thirds so that all three members could contribute some information on a specific subject. I am focusing on studies that are about cognition and polysubstance dependence.

10. Week 11: The group finished the rough draft of the article. My sections are: Commonalities in Polysubstance Dependence, the Cognition section under "Studies that have been done on Polysubstance Dependence".

11. Week 12: I peer-reviewed the Corumination article done by one of the class groups. See here for the the peer review under the heading "Peer Review for PSYC 181" on Corumination article discussion page. The group met to discuss feedback from the rough draft and made a list of things to work on, which is posted on the Polysubstance dependence article discussion page. We changed the titles of some of the headings, so now I am working on the lead paragraph, Epidemiology, Biological causes, and Associated Cognitive Impairments.

12. Week 13: I continued editing my sections of the article, and learned how to insert images into an article (see my sandbox at the bottom of this page for an example). I also nominated our article for good article status under the topic of "Psychology" on the good article nominations page.

13. Week 14: Having received more feedback from the professor on the article, I continued editing my sections and worked on this portfolio. Besides editing grammar and punctuation (which improves clarity!), I've been adding links to define terms in the article. Please see the Polysubstance dependence talk page for the Communication part of the portfolio. Here is one example of a constructive comment: diff.

Note: see my contributions link for a complete list of my edits to Wikipedia.

Reflective Essay
This project first seemed very intimidating to me. In some ways, it is still intimidating. My work can be viewed by anyone who uses Wikipedia, and, being the perfectionist that I am, I want my best work to be presented. I still make mistakes, of course. This project has been very challenging for me, which can be good, but I also have felt stressed during this project.. Part of the challenge comes from not being quite comfortable with the technology and the fact that whatever I post can be viewed by anyone. Another challenge has been to manage my time to be able to complete the weekly assignments for PSYC 181 and also work on this project. Sometimes I have felt that I do not quite understand the style of writing a Wikipedia article, even after looking at Wikipedia's MoS page. In my college classes, I have been trained to write with all sorts of long words and in scholarly language. It has been difficult for me to change to less technical language. Research has been challenging due to the lack of sources that summarize studies done on polysubstance dependence. So most of the sources are studies that describe the methods and results of the experiment.

I have also succeeded in some areas on Wikipedia. For example, I feel more comfortable with editing the article now than at the beginning and the middle of this project. I think that I have a basic knowledge of editing tools, which helps to edit more items in less time and can even be fun. Researching polysubstance dependence has also given me experience in research, which is important.

The collective experience was encouraging. I am very glad that I did not have to write this article on my own, because I think I would have felt overwhelmed and very stressed out. My group members were willing to work hard and split the work, which made it easier to work together. I am impressed with how the article looks and I think that our way of splitting up the article into different sections was effective. One of the main challenges was finding a time to meet. The times when one person was free were not often free for the other members. We did attempt to meet over Skype, but it was a little difficult to maintain the Internet connection. After we lost one member, finding a good time became a little easier. Overall, I think that we worked well together.