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A thought experiment:
You get to campus and discover that you have left your laptop, iPad, and phone at home.
You don’t have a desktop computer.
You can’t borrow another device.
And no cheating - your Apple Watch is also at home.
What do you do?
What does your day look like?
You can’t read or send e-mail. You can’t log into your institution's learning management system (LMS). You can’t work on Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. You can’t analyze data with SPSS, Stata, or SAS.
You can’t participate in online conferences or web meetings - no Skype or Adobe Connnect or Zoom.
You can’t connect with your colleagues - local or remote - on Slack or Google Hangouts or Jabber or Yammer.
No learning analytics or social media campaigns. No Twitter. No Facebook. And no Inside Higher Ed.
What else are you not doing?
Okay - so you can’t do anything that you normally would do on a screen. What do you do instead?
How would you spend your day computer / screen free day on campus?
First, and most obviously, you could teach. If you are not teaching online then your residential class can go forward beautifully without any screens.
Maybe you could walk around and talk to colleagues outside of a scheduled meeting? Folks might be happy to see you for an unscheduled drop-in. (Or maybe not).
Would you sit somewhere on campus and read a book - an actual paper book?
Or maybe you have a bunch of printed out chapters or reports and documents that have been sitting on your desk, unread, and this is the perfect opportunity to work your way through them.
Phone calls. You might actually pick up the phone and call a colleague on campus or at another institution. They would be surprised to hear from you in this way.
If the weather was nice, you could fill up some of the day with walking meetings.
On this day you can’t work through lunch, reading e-mails and catching up on news, so why not find a colleague to join you for a meal.
How stressed would you be being away from e-mail for a day?
Would you worry that the people that you work with might come to the conclusion that you are really not that indispensable if they don’t hear from you for a day?
The extent of digital connectivity addiction would disturb even the most meta amongst us. All of us higher ed people are tethered to the umbilical cords of our screens. Cut the cord for the day and see how well we breathe.
When was the last time you spent a whole day on campus without interacting with a screen?
