I just got back from a long weekend camping at the base of Fuji. Within a day, my phone died and with it went my access to anything online, and any pressing sense of responsibility to be on top of anything beyond what was in front of me. I don’t say this to lead into some great sigh of melodramatic relief at a temporary reprieve from the pressures of digital connectedness, but I think it’s sort of compounded what I’ve been wrestling with consistently over the past while.

With my commitments to my course of study, along with my increasing use of technology with and for my students, my efforts to maintain contact with people far and wide, and everything everything everything else that has me doing this hands on keyboard routine… my non-contact time with digital information in all its forms is diminishing ever more rapidly. And not just personally, also professionally. Or vice versa. Whatever sounds more dramatic.

It’s one thing for me to wrestle with this in my personal life (Elif showed the somewhat trite, but also poignant video below to this effect during our workshop last week), and totally another to consider how it’s playing out in my classroom.

All the time that is being poured into conceiving, researching, resourcing and executing digital-based projects in class is time that is inevitably not being put into other varieties of learning. As someone who believes so profoundly and thoroughly in the value and necessity of cooperative and experiential forms of education (from outdoor ed. to service learning, to role plays and on), I’m concerned about this shift that’s occurring in the way my teaching and learning time is being spent.

Just last week I spent considerable time and effort putting together a dentistry role play learning experience in my class, in support of our ongoing inquiry into health and balanced lifestyles. The quality and degree of cooperative learning and focused interaction it brought out in my class has given me further pause for thought. My students commitment was total and their reflection was among the strongest its been this year. I could have spent equal time developing some sort of digitally supported experience, but this time I didn’t, and I can’t think of any such activity which I imagine would have been as successful.

After the event, I spent considerable time compiling video and images into a short film above to share the experience with the community, and received more active commentary on the post than any previous item this year, from parents, to administration and back to students again. While creating the video below facilitated this dialogue, was fun for me and certainly loved by my students, I can’t help but wonder if the time could have been better spent developing further authentic and experiential learning experiences for my class. Doing one kind of project certainly doesn’t exclude doing another, but time and energy are finite, and the search for balance is ongoing.