An interesting blog on current developments in neuropsychology:

http://www.mindhacks.com/

For those who are interested in this area, Oliver Sacks' The man who mistook his wife for a hat is worth a read - I'm trying to find a copy to put into the college library, but it should be available from your local library or secondhand.

A tragic story about a woman who died in Edinburgh while giving birth to twins - interesting to note the level of media coverage of this death, given that just a few generations ago such instances were commonplace. In the 1930s, for example, some 15% of births ended in the mother's death, and it was only after WW2 that the figures began to improve significantly. Today, of course, it's relatively rare - and a front page story when it does happen.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4878414.stm

As well as the OU, I'm also doing a TQFE course with the University of Dundee. As part of that, I created the PsychB blog, for students in the HNC Social Science 1C class at Stow. I've decided not to continue the PsychB blog in its current form, but instead to use this blog as a wider social science-related blog with a psychology skew. Hopefully, I'll be able to use it to post up all those interesting articles and websites which I think 'ooh, I must show the class that' and which then end up cluttering up my desk some six months later. That's the idea, anyway.

The blog will run alongside our 'static' social science webpages, where you'll find class notes and lots more links.

To get us started, here's one of the most interesting weblinks (I think) from the PsychB blog - Zimbardo's prison experiment. 1C students should already be familiar with this as we used it in the discussion on ethics, but if you haven't already had a look, do so - an excellent site put together by Zimbardo himself.

Still dark and raining...

I'm currently studying for an Open University BSc Psychology, I'll be halfway through as of 21 October, which also happens to be my birthday! If you haven't come across the Open University, it's well worth a look- www.open.ac.uk. They have an extremely impressive range of courses, all delivered on a distance learning basis, with regular face to face or telephone tutorials. I've completed (almost!) two level 2 psychology modules, DSE212 Exploring Psychology and ED209 Child Development, and I've found their materials to be top notch. I hadn't really thought much about the OU until someone at work mentioned them, but now that I'm studying with them, it's like a secret society, with OU students coming out of the woodwork everywhere! OU students seem to be a pretty hardworking bunch, and there are so many people you come across who never had the chance to attend a 'brick' uni - like the octogenarian Yorkshire woman at the Summer School I attended last year.

Hello and welcome to my Blog

I'm Pam, I'm 29 years old (30 in less than a fortnight!) and I teach at Stow College, a Further Education college in the centre of Glasgow. I live in Cardonald with an aged cat called Banjo - he only moved in yesterday. At 10, Banjo is younger than the previous cat, Gus, who died in June aged 15, and they're both nippers compared to Flo-Jo, my parents' cat, who's still going strong at 17, along with her son, William, at 16, and Maisie, who I think is now 12.

OK, enough about aged cats!! Don't know quite what I'm going to do with this blog yet but it does look fun, I've been thinking about using blogs at work so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

I'm about to head home before it gets completely pitch dark, I don't actually think it got light - or stopped raining - at all today. I have visitors from Oxford who wanted to go for a nice walk by the Clyde, I tried to persuade them that the bus and a nice museum with a tea shop might be a better idea - I'll go and see how they got on.