Michael Roberts

In this article, we describe a project examining flashbulb memories. Students enrolled in introductory psychology courses recorded their memories for the same event during the first class meeting of the semester and then again 2 months later during the memory section of the course. Students analyzed the data for content and consistency. The analyses served as a vehicle for introducing and demonstrating memory phenomena. The project improved student understanding of memory phenomena, and students reported that the project was valuable in learning about memory functions and observing memory errors and distortions.

I argue for the idea that avid readers whose process of primary socialization was as much influenced by reading as by interaction with the people around them are a true minority group. We are an unusual community because every avid reader was born into some particular culture made up mostly of people who do not love to read. We are a community of those with nothing in common beyond our love of reading. Every member of our community is also an example of Hybridity. Hybridity is as much a consequence avid reading as of globalization. People who love to read are more comfortable with globalization than those who do not.

Much work has been done in Second Life intended to help autistics acquire social skills by explicitly teaching these skills, which most of us acquire in the normal course of development without formal instruction, in Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) that provide both safe space and rehearsal space. ESL activities facilitated by experienced and well trained instructors serve a large group of persons from non-English speaking countries whose schooling left them literate in English but with no functional command of the spoken language. The two activities have yet to overlap to create any resources specifically designed for English Language Learners who are autistic. Research establishes that the path autistics follow to acquire languages is very different from the more typical pattern that ESL instructors are normally safe in assuming will be followed as they prepare to teach. This argues that such an overlap would benefit this sub-population of ELL. SL is the best place to provide instruction specifically designed to accommodate the profile of abilities and disabilities characteristic of a very narrowly defined sub-population of learners. Such learners will be rare in most schools. SL makes it possible to gather these rare learners from many different schools to be instructed together in one VLE designed with their special needs in mind.

In terms of general acceptance, online therapy is today where online education was around 1990. Speaking from my perspective as a veteran distance educator who lived through the period when distance education slowly became mainstream, I am predicting that online therapy's mainstreaming will follow a similar pattern.

I argue that any attempt to draw a distinction between behaviors which are altruistic and behaviors which are selfish is doomed to failure given the looking-glass nature of the self which results from normal human development. The nature of the looking-glass self as a self for others makes the distinction between what we do for ourselves and what we do for others at best hard to draw and, at worst, a way of looking at human motivation that obscures more than it reveals.

Being American is not, like being German or French, an ethnicity. It is a nationality but it is a peculiar nationality in that most people who today claim that nationality are converts from some other nationality; many of them define themselves culturally in part based on what their ancestors were before becoming American. The big idea that I want to defend is the notion that, when Americans go searching for their roots, they are not trying to establish a set of historical facts that still have relevance to their lives today. They are, rather, constructing a creation myth, personal and poetic, out of fragments of history.