Psychotherapy 2.0

...is the title of a newly published book by Karnac about the place "where psychotherapy and technology meet". I have a chapter included here with my erstwhile colleague Prof Digby Tantam, and a section written by Anne Stokes, which examines "training fit for the digital era". The message from Digby and myself is that e-learning is surprisingly well suited (and it was a surprise to us at the outset, back in 2002) to psychotherapy training. We concentrate on the kinds of emotional transactions which e-learning makes possible, or affords (I will come back to the idea of affordances in a later blog post), and in particular, the way that a fairly bog-standard online course set-up (hyperlinked course materials, discussion forums, chatrooms) can allow people to examine personal experience in light of theory, in a way they can't always do in face-to-face learning. We focus on how we used the e-learning programme to prepare people to do their own online teaching- other chapters in the book discuss e-therapy in greater depth. 

Three minute thesis

By way of introducing my research interest, and the topic of my PhD, I recently recorded a video, with the help of a ScHARR colleague Luke Miller, for the University of Sheffield's Three Minute Thesis competition for 2013-14. The idea is that PhD students are given guidance and support on how to create a video summarising their research in less than three minutes. This can go into a University of Sheffield competition, and the winner can go forward to a national competition. Fame and wealth- hitherto unimagined- lie in store. For what it is worth, I have got through the first stage to the Faculty Final later in May. The presentation you can see in the video actually breaks some of the competition rules, and I will be recorded giving the live presentation, with a static backdrop, at the Faculty final. Whilst the idea of marketing myself doesn't sit altogether comfortably with me (he says, in his own blog...), it is useful to be cajoled into thinking how to communicate a large piece of work in short, simple terms.