Tag: knowledge

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”

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.

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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.

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"You cannot write up intuition and send it to the White House in intelligence reports"

Andy Driska

Robert and Dayna Baer, two former CIA agents who married each other, appeared on Fresh Air on March 7, 2011. They discussed life in the CIA, what it’s like to fall in love with another agent, but more interestingly, the current crises in the Middle East and North Africa. Mr. Baer’s conclusions that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have commandeered precious intelligence resources away from other countries in the Muslim world was striking. Then he said that despite the lack of intelligence in the region, even good intelligence would have struggled to predict the current uprisings. He stated: Mr. … Continue reading "You cannot write up intuition and send it to the White House in intelligence reports"