Tag: blogging

Culture, Research, Teaching5 Comments

Day in the Life – #dayofhighered

Andy Driska

This morning, I woke up around 6:15am, and came across this article of a Day of Higher Ed on my LinkedIn reading list, suggesting that academics respond to a recent critique in a Washington Post editorial that academics are “underworked.”  It resonated, given my recent frustrations with managing my workload, and my feelings that my “work” as a research assistant and teaching assistant has compromised my experience as a doctoral student.  I think it’s always important to really document the “problem” so I figured I would track my day and add it to the conversation on Twitter with the #dayofhighered hash-tag.

So here goes… Continue reading “Day in the Life – #dayofhighered”

Coaching, ResearchLeave a comment

Coach expertise development – what prompts accelerated learning?

Andy Driska

I recently commented on an article regarding coach expertise development, written by Richard Bailey (“Talking Education and Sport”).  The big question: do coaches move through “stages” of expertise, or is their development completely linear?  Most researchers speculate that development is generally stage-like.

I am particularly interested in the events that happen right before a rapid increase in coaching expertise.  What are the triggers that cause rapid learning to occur?  Some suggestions…

Continue reading “Coach expertise development – what prompts accelerated learning?”

Research, Teaching3 Comments

Book Review: Blended Learning in Higher Education

Andy Driska

As an instructor, how can I make the most out of limited contact hours with students? A semester seems like a long time… between 28 and 30 hour-and-twenty-minute meetings. But in reality, that time goes quickly, and when the end of the semester rolls around, I often ask myself, “did my students actually learn anything meaningful?”

To make learning experiences meaningful, I struggle with a basic question that most collegiate educators struggle with daily. Do I go broad, and attempt to “cover” lots of material? Or do I choose core concepts, and go into depth, giving students the time and scaffolding to ask deeper questions about the knowledge itself. This deep thinking is the gold-mine that all instructors are trying to find, but sometimes students need some “surface knowledge” before they can start digging deeper.

Continue reading “Book Review: Blended Learning in Higher Education”

Research, TeachingLeave a comment

My Information Diet

Andy Driska

I’ve been prompted to examine my “information diet,” which includes all of my sources of information throughout the day.

I typically wake up around 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning, to the sound of the Michigan State University college radio station, Impact 89 FM. I love the awkward first-time DJs, and the station seems to have an early 1990s nostalgia — lots of grunge.

Ever since I got an iPhone, I now read most of my e-mail in the morning while I am lying in bed. There are about 20 minutes where I don’t want to be physically awake and out of bed, but I need to do something to wake my mind up. I get e-mail alerts from ScienceDaily website, which keeps me up to date on a range of topics from Social Psychology to Sensory Perception. Occasionally, I will tweet the findings of the study — I use twitter to catalog and bookmark things that are of interest to me.

Continue reading “My Information Diet”

UncategorizedLeave a comment

A second go-round

Andy Driska

This blog represents my attempt to re-romance the web. Ten years ago, or thereabouts, I spent a lot of time creating websites. It started with a website for the Ithaca College swim team (I’m a 2000 IC alum), which probably provided a little too much information on some of our team’s extracurricular activities. The college and sports information weren’t savvy enough to notice that there were pictures of athletes drinking beer on a quasi-official team site (I will attribute my indiscretion to the fact that I was a 20 year-old college boy lacking anything that resembled good judgment). That was … Continue reading A second go-round