Online Tutorials
- Online Texts and Tutorials
- Provided by Psychwatch.com Covering cognition, learning and memory, neuropsy and biopsychology, general psychology, social psychology and statistics.
- Psychotherapy Index
- From Psychnet-UK.com. A collection of articles and links to various forms of psychotherapy. See also its pages on Mental Disorders, Personality Disorders, and NHS Mental Health.
Distance Learning Support and Collaborative Work Tools
If you are studying to be a psychotherapist, you'll be in a training group. But when apart from each other there are lots of Internet tools around to help you support each other, work together, and stay in touch. They each have slightly overlapping abilities, so many of the options are AND rather than OR options:
1. Email
This is nice and simple: just collect each others email addresses and then email each other with your questions / thoughts / comments, etc. The advantage of this is that it is simple, even for people who are a bit technophobic. The disadvantage is that it is simple: there are no extra features than just sending each other notes.
2. Instant Messaging (IM)
This is nearly simple - you have to download an Instant Messaging (Windows XP comes with Microsoft's IM tool, but there are plenty of others:
ICQ
AOL Instant Messenger
Yahoo Messenger
See also: How Instant Messaging WorksThe big advantage of IM is that you can see when others are working at their computers at the same time as you, and it is open only to people you invite to chat with (it's hence very popular with children, who can chat with their friends after school (for many many hours) without being bothered by dodgy adults. So it is much more conversational, much less the question and answer of email.
3. eGroups
An eGroup (the most popular is Yahoo Groups). This is email based - you send an email to your Yahoo Group and the message is sent on to all the members of the group. It is also permanently recorded in the group, so you have a history of all messages. You can also upload files and photos to the group, keep a group calendar, have votes (polls) and organise group chats, when you can talk directly to each other (without the time delay of email) like IM.
The only disadvantage is that it is slightly more complex. Everyone has to register with Yahoo (free), someone has to set it up, and everyone else has to learn to use it - but neither of these are hard. For Transactional Analysts, the ITAA's forum is a Yahoo Group.
4. Blog (Weblog)
Blogs, by default, are a simple way to create a website in the form of a diary, but they can be collaborative. Blogger.com for example allows multiple authors to contribute to a blog. The big advantage of a blog is that it produces public web pages, so your musing will add to the sum of TA knowledge on the web. And the disadvantage is that it obviously isn't confidential. Nonetheless, for non confidential ideas, or for things you are personally happy to share about yourself, they are excellent, and it is common to build up a web blog (blogroll) whose contributors comment on each others blogs and create posts sparked by someone else's blog. See my list of Transactional Analysis Blogs.
5. Collaborative White Board
If you want to help each other with your assignments, offering up your work to collective criticism, or helping those with learning difficulties (eg, dyslexics), you could use a shared workspace like White Board.
This is a shared working area where invited people can come and contribute to the information presented there. This could be messages, discussions on what something means, draft assignments, or all those lovely diagrams.
Nothing is lost, you can always go back to an earlier version. It is private, by invitation / password protected, so you can maintain the group confidentiality protocol. You can compare what is written now with what was written in an earlier version. Brainstorm ideas. Or you can ask someone to edit/comment on an essay before submitting it.
Now, though these tools are useful, it will depend on the dynamics of your training group, and how much complexity, confidentiality, PC literacy and willingness to make it work it has.
Personally, I would recommend an eGroup if the group is quite supportive and close (otherwise just email), backed by IM if they are chatty. The Whiteboard could be useful sometimes, perhaps for working in pairs remotely. And the more confident members of the group might be encouraged to express their wit and wisdom in a blog.