SCP2012.9

Week 12

The topic of this week’s lecture was ‘The Expert Pedagogue’.  Keith introduced us to a couple of extremely successful coaches.  One of the coaches was John Wooden, a college basketball coach.  Wooden wrote a book about coaching, it was titled: You haven’t taught until they have learned.  This book speaks about teaching principles and practice.  I think the name of this book is not only a fantastic title but also a great motto for anyone to coach by.  I think it simplifies coaching.  These words remove all the distractions that can develop with coaching and brings the task back to the basics.  Coaches can then simply implement the necessary teaching strategies which will ensure their athletes/pupils are learning and improving.     

Keith also introduced us to a psychologist, Carol Dweck.  She alludes to the idea that people are in charge of their own intelligence.  She states that being smart is not a gift, nor is it a product of genetic good fortune.  The idea is that the brain is like a muscle, and the more you use it, the stronger it gets.  This is illustrated in the picture below.  Furthermore, Dweck poses the question, ‘How often do you laugh at babies for being stupid?’  Babies aren’t dumb, they just haven’t learned yet.  This idea can apply to people of any age, simply because someone doesn’t know something doesn’t mean that they don’t have the capacity to learn it.  This concept can be directly translated to coaching.  It may be unfair to deem players who perform below standard, or struggle with executing a particular skill as having no ability.  Instead, they may have simply never learned the skill and only need it to be taught to them to understand how to perform it.

Dweck’s opinions and thoughts can be seen in more detail in this YouTube video. 

  http://slavieboy.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/mindsets-and-carol-dweck-live-from.html

SCP2012.8

Week 11

Hi guys! Following on from last week’s blog, I would like to share a website which Keith added to the unit’s Facebook page.

The website, which can be viewed here, displays a number of interesting facts and figures about social networking sites.  One of the main points that I took away from reading this website was the power of social networking.  Yes, I realised before that social networking was a powerful tool, but some of the figures shown are quite phenomenal.  Such figures include:

·         On average in 2011, 140 million tweets were sent per day.

·         There are now 845+ million users on Facebook.

·         On March 12 2011, 572,000 people registered a Twitter account.

These numbers are incredible and certainly reinforce how much social media can influence society.

Keith’s presentation this week alluded to both Tudor Bompa and Istvan Balyi, and the training models developed by these two men.  For this week’s blog, I thought I would offer a little bit more insight into these two people and the training models they have developed.

Tudor Bompa is considered by many as the ‘father’ of periodisation.  Bompa created a method which broke down an athlete’s training program to specify their training and allow them to benefit more from their training.  An example of this is shown here.

Bompa was born in Romania and begun his sporting career by playing soccer, as well as competing in track and field events.  Bompa later got into the sport of rowing and in the 1958 Rowing European Championships he won a silver medal.  Bompa is the only coach to produce both Olympic and World Champions in 2 different sports – rowing and athletics.  To date, he has written 16 books, selling more than 650,000 copies worldwide.  I gathered my information from this website, where more knowledge about Bompa can be gained.   

Similarly, Istvan Balyi is considered an expert in long term athlete development (LTAD).  An example of the ‘Balyi Model’ can be seen below:

http://www.unchainedfitness.com/blog/windows-of-opportunity-and-athlete-development  

The LTAD principles allow coaches to integrate training, competition and recovery programming into the biological development of an individual so that they can reach their full potential.   The concept involves a number of stages which are shown and displayed in detail on this website

While exploring YouTube for videos relating to periodization, I found this video about coaching.  Like me, I’m sure many people won’t find it very interesting as it’s a rather basic video.  However, I still think it displays a very good insight into coaching.  It shows the role of a coach very well.  Basically it demonstrates how the athlete or pupil can achieve success by themselves, simply with the guidance of a coach.  Anyway, if you’re interested then check it out!

Thanks for reading!

   

SCP2012.7

Week 10

Hi guys, after a bit of a break, I’m back for another post.  In this week’s SCP lecture, Keith raised some interesting points.  I would like to re-hash some of these points and build on them as well.

Technology has come a long way in a relatively short space of time.  Compared to a decade ago, the internet is so readily available these days.  The introduction of so many mobile devices, which are capable of accessing online material combined with the ever increasing wireless internet hotspots, means global connectivity is more advanced than ever.

As Keith touched on in his lecture, we (as students) can produce work and have it displayed around the world within minutes.  We don’t require IT specialists anymore, we can do this ourselves.  This is evident with the recently completed SCP presentations.  Thanks to various websites (youtube, slideshare, prezi and wikiversity) our presentations for this unit can be witnessed anywhere in the world.  In fact Keith has compiled a wikiversity page to house everyone’s presentations, making it even easier to view people’s work.  This can be viewed here.

The world is becoming closer than ever through technological advancements, meaning work and study can be shared/stolen so much easier.  This situation poses the question, do copyright/ plagiarism laws need to be tighter to ensure the originality of people’s work?  Or would it be better to relax the laws and allow people to openly use other people’s work?  I think both sides of the argument have valid points.   

As we’re all aware, the university plagiarism laws are quite strict.  Although a slight relaxation of these laws could lead to a host of problems, it would also allow people to work together much more freely with people anywhere in the world to potentially create a higher quality of work.  As mentioned by Keith, Wikipedia is becoming a more reputable source.  It is constantly being updated and monitored to ensure the information is correct and reliable.  Maybe more Wikipedia type webpages will be the way of the future.  Places where anyone can post information and share their knowledge.  Of course, policing the validity of the info could be the main issue, however this is contrasted with the policing of plagiarism laws, which is likely to become harder in this growing global network.      

I would like to leave a final thought for anyone who may wish to comment.  Will it one day be possible to learn everything you need to know in a certain field, solely using the internet?  Ie. Will the internet allow us to acquire a university degree (or equivalent) without attending campus or paying the tuition fees?

Any thoughts are welcome, thank you!