Back from Digital Darkness

I’m returning this morning from my week of digital darkness. Although not complete darkness, enough so that the time away allowed me to refocus on what is important in life. My wife and I played Gin Rummy last night. The first time we’ve played in a really long time…it was nice.

I’ve been disconnected before. Usually when on vacation and traveling both of which are usually not voluntary. This was the first time that it was truly voluntary for me to give up being connected outside of the school day. After 3:00 I didn’t touch a computer….difficult indeed. I even managed to post my techlearning article this past week during my online time at school so not to break the week streak. I did not go complete screen free as doing so would mean sleeping the whole week. The one concession that both my wife and I made was our cell phone and text messaging. It has become so much a part of the way we communicate that just because we were trying to give it up for a week, friends of ours would still text us. Making it a necessity to communicate. Is a screen a communication tool? I guess so, it’s a visual tool that we use to communicate in different forms.

I didn’t complete all my offline tasks this week, but did enjoy getting through Knowing Knowledge by George Siemens. I’ve been carrying the pdf around with me for some time and started awhile back posting my highlights here. I’ll be doing that again in the coming weeks, and this book really gets to the heart of knowledge today and how these networks are changing the way we think, learn, teach, and interact. I have a lot of thinking to do on what I read and plan on posting much of it here.  Good stuff. I will be buying the book when I get back to the states this summer. I’m also thinking of using this as the text for the class I’ll be teaching this summer. So much good stuff that really pushes and pulls at your thinking.

Enough for now….I’m back online, refreshed, refocused, and ready for some new deep thinking.

Thanks for stickin’ around. 🙂

[tags]knowing knowldge, George Siemens, TVturnoff[/tags]

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