Blogging v. life

Cara Hagen has a fun post on her EdTechConnection blog describing the challenges she faces as she tries to balance blogging and learning new technologies with the other demands of her personal and professional life:

How messy can I let my house get because I’m online instead of on my

knees scrubbing? How much time with my kids am I willing to give up in

order to get up to speed on all the possibilities of Google Docs. How many frozen pizzas can I serve while I try to catch up on the many many sites I want to post to my del.icio.us list?

Of course this is a serious issue for most of us – there is WAY too much cool stuff to learn.

Barry Schwartz has written about the often-debilitating effects of having too many choices. I think the magnitude of learning, and learning choices, related to digital technologies is one of the things that makes them so intimidating / frightening to teachers, administrators, and professors. They see the potential but they also see the time drain. These are realistic concerns; as technology-oriented change agents, we ignore them at our peril.