Are your reading this on Sunday, over a cup of coffee, or are you at your desk on Monday morning?
For many the distinction between working and leisure is getting very blurred. When does work end and when does home begin?
Can you “switch off” at the end of the day or are you checking the Twitter, e-mail, the VLE or other online services from home, on the sofa, whilst eating your tea, in bed just before your turn out the light, or if you have an iPad after the lights go out! Is checking the Twitter actually work anyway?
Technology can blur the demarcation that exists in the work-life balance, making it very easy to do work stuff outside the core hours of your institution.
Of course for learners the very technologies that blur the lines between home and work, can blur the demarcation between study and everything else. For many learners there is no demarcation, they can will study where and when they want to, in the past they may have used books and paper, now they use mobile browsers and e-book readers. The informal learning of the past was constrained, often to an individual activity, today informal learning can be, thanks to technology, an asynchronous or synchronous, collaborative, group experience. Many learning activities that would have been considered formal before, can now, through technology, be part of the informal learning that happens. Think about lectures, which are considered structured and formal, with YouTube, other video services, lecture capture, can now be accessed when and where the learner wants them, so blurring the formal and the informal. Discussion forums on the VLE allow seminar style activities to happen without the constraints of geography or time.
So is learning getting blurred in your institution?
What are the implications for teachers and learners?