The e-book is going to be called The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies and I shall be employing the OpenBeta publishing model I pioneered a couple of years ago with #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

Invest now for £1 and get each chapter as it is completed FREE!

Can’t see anything above? Click here!

What are ‘digital literacies’? Why are they important? How can I develop them both personally and in other people? These are some of the questions that ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies by Doug Belshaw seeks to address. Informed by his doctoral thesis and experience as an educator, ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies’ Doug is producing a timely resource for those who are interested in both the theory and the practice of digital literacies!

FAQ:

When are you going to finish this?

It depends on many things, but here’s my proposed timescale:

• v0.2 – April 2012
• v0.4 – June 2012
• v0.6 – August 2012
• v0.8 – October 2012
• v1.0 – December 2012

I’m erring on the conservative side here. I’d rather under-promise and over-deliver!

In what formats will the book be available?

The OpenBeta version will be available in iPad-friendly (and reasonably Kindle-friendly) PDF format. The finished version will be available in the following forms:

• PDF
• Kindle
• ePub
• (Paperback/Hardback depending on demand)

How much will the final version be?

£10 – around $15/16 at the current exchange rate

(this is subject to change without notice)

I still don’t understand the OpenBeta process?

More here, but this should help:

How long will the book be altogether?

I’m envisaging each chapter being about 1,000 words, so about 11,000 in total. This is subject to change when I start writing but it will be at least 10,000 words.

Are there any refunds? How do I know you will complete it?

No refunds, but I have managed to write several e-books before and have much more free time now I have completed my thesis! You can always wait until it’s finished, but that will cost more…

Image in book cover CC BY { pranav }

Got a different question? Ask it in the comments below!

The result of the analysis I carried out yesterday is a 34-page PDF document including graphs and anonymised feedback from the 137 readers who took part. You should be able to see it below (I recommend viewing fullscreen – click the arrows!)

If the above isn’t working for whatever reason, you can also get it at the Internet Archive.

1. The survey is now closed. Thank you very much to those who took time to give me some valuable feedback!

2. We have three winners of physical copies of Best of Belshaw 2011 randomly drawn from those leaving their name and email address. Congratulations Melanie Knight, Katie Hassman and Lesley Gourlay. Witness the process of randomly choosing here.

3. Interestingly, despite their having ceased over a year ago, re-introducing my Things I Learned This Week posts featured heavily in the question about how I could improve this blog. I’m still mulling over what to do about this.

Thanks again to those who took part. It’s given me much to smile about and lots to reflect upon. I’ll have an anonymised breakdown of results in a post next week. First I need to crunch the numbers and produce some pretty charts…

The survey is now closed. Thanks for your interest!

(9 questions + bonus for chance to win hard copy of Best of Belshaw 2011)

Over the years I’ve added things and taken away things from this blog. I’ve experimented with tone, titles, blog post length and use of images. But really I need to know more about YOU, my audience. So please do take five minutes to fill in this survey so I can write stuff that’s more likely to resonate.

I’ll select three people at random who leave their name and email address in the last (optional) question to receive a paperback copy of Best of Belshaw 2011.

I look forward to sharing the results!

Image CC BY-NC-SA Zoppola

It’s FREE and available to download now.

Download Best of Belshaw 2011

Also available:

• Best of Belshaw 2010
• Best of Belshaw 2009

I’ve got an idea for a book on The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies as well as an updated version of #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

Be sure to subscribe to RSS or email updates to keep on top of these developments!

The things I anticipated doing during my break from social networks and personal email during December and what I actually did were quite different. Here’s what I got up to:

• Prepared for my viva voce (thesis defense)
• Got my thesis rewrites done
• Played almost no Battlefield 3 (but a whole lot of Football Manager 2012 Handheld)
• Spent a lot more time with my children
• Started tracking the food I eat
• Took the time to read about the best ways to use Evernote (and started using it ‘properly’)
• Completed the mammoth semi-annual Christmas pilgrimage to my in-laws in Devon
• Read more physical (as opposed to Kindle) books
• Started using Path with close friends and family
• Compiled Best of Belshaw 2011
• Redesigned this blog (as well as the Purpos/ed website and Doug’s Ideas Garden)
• Set up ThoughtShrapnel.com
• Watched more films in one month than I did in the preceding eleven
• Re-assessed my direction in life
• Started using a SAD light (early birthday present)
• Chilled out a whole lot more than I usually do (Migraine count: 1)

What I really missed social network-wise wasn’t the constant stream of news but the positive reinforcement and support I get. This was shown by the number of messages of congraultations I received both in the comments of my last blog post and on Twitter.

Of course, the question I now get asked is: Now you’ve finished your doctorate, what’s next?

Well, I answer, I’ve got some exciting stuff coming up – I’m running a workshop with Prof. Keri Facer at Learning Without Frontiers at the end of January, and then March is a busy month, with me heading to San Francisco for the DML Conference, speaking at TEDx Warwick, and keynoting a conference for the first time (see my Lanyrd profile for details).

At work I’ll be supporting the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme, updating the Mobile Learning infoKit and continuing to champion stuff around open education.

Other than that and a couple of other bits and pieces, I’m open to offers. I’ve been asked to submit a book proposal and things are ticking along nicely with Synechism Ltd. (on a part-time basis). Whilst I’m very much enjoying things at the moment, my focus is on doing interesting stuff that aligns with my values (openness, freedom, authenticity) and that allows me to spend as much time as I can with my family.

We’ll see where that takes me.

Image CC BY-SA Todd Klassy

I’m pleased to announce that I successfully defended my doctoral thesis at my viva voce on 12th December 2011. As expected, the examiners gave me minor rewrites but I managed to submit these to my supervisor before Christmas.

Whilst I can’t officially call myself ‘Doctor Belshaw’ until I’m on Durham University’s pass list (and even then I’m probably not your go-to person for emergency tracheotomies) I’m delighted with the culmination of six years’ work into digital and new literacies.

It’s great to be back on social networks such as Twitter and Google+ and press ‘delete’ on hundreds of emails (well, I did warn people…)

Image CC BY-NC-SA Johan Prawiro

As I explained a month ago, reminded everyone a couple of weeks ago, and have had in my email signature for the past week, my ‘Black Ops’ period has started. I’ll be back full of energy and bursting at the seams to write on January 1st, 2012.

What does this mean?

No personal email.

No social networking.

Caveats

I’ll still be at work (although next year I’m really going to push to be off for the entirety of December)

You’ll be be able to catch me via Skype (doug_belshaw)

However, I’m uninstalling Twitter, Facebook and Google+ from my iPhone and TweetDeck from my various machines. I’m putting on my email autoresponder and deleting everything that comes in during December.

Need something to read?

These have been my most popular posts of 2011 (in descending order):

1. The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies (#digilit)
   
2. Commoditising learning through the #flippedclassroom (or, the difference between education and training)
3. How I Use a MacBook Pro (May 2011)
4. The Digital Native/Immigrant dichotomy.
5. Project Reclaim: or, how I learned to start worrying and love my data.
6. Semester of Learning: Open Badges and assessment
7. What would a post-test era look like for our schools?
8. Read the first complete draft of my doctoral thesis on digital literacies.
9. 5 free, web-based tools to help you be a kick-ass researcher.
10. Why I spent my twenties unlearning my teenage years.
    

But my favourite post of 2011? Probably this one.

Oh, and if you’ve never stopped by literaci.es, Doug’s Conference Blog or Doug’s FAQ there’s probably enough there to keep you going until I return. You can subscribe to everything I write via RSS or email at Doug’s Writing Feed.

Still here? Did you know I did Black Ops last year? I got lots of other stuff done!

Have a great Christmas and New Year.

As I’ve already mentioned, in a couple of weeks’ time I’m going to be disconnecting from networks for a calendar month. I’ll still be at work, but won’t be tweeting or replying to personal email at all.

Many thanks to those people who have been in touch asking if that means for them as well. The answer? Yep, absolutely.

So if you’ve got something you need me to do or respond to, please let me know sooner rather than later! Come December 1st you’ll have to either phone me or stop by my house.

Image CC BY-NC-SA pni

When I was in New York recently I didn’t attend the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Whilst I respect the ideas behind the movement, I’m just not sure it’s achieving anything. The protest inspired by #occupyws in my nearest city of Newcastle is certainly a bit forlorn and is gently ridiculed by the media. What’s far more effective, I think, is to infiltrate and convert the mass media to the cause. Not only does this mean a much wider representation of the ideas behind what’s going on, but (hopefully) retains the purity of the message.

I can’t claim to have read widely on the literature around #occupy and their message that it’s the 1% of the population that are screwing it up for everyone else but this article in the Guardian by George Monbiot certainly includes a few home truths. Here are what I consider to be the highlights (my emphases):

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the rutheless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you’re likely to go to business school.

Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they’ve captured than oil sheikhs.
…
Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

Whilst I agree with most of the ideas behind the above, one thing (perhaps because of space) that Monbiot doesn’t mention is that, financially, we in the west are pretty much all in the top 5% of the world’s richest people. I turn on a tap and water comes out. If I’m cold I turn up the heating. I can send my children to school for free. I don’t worry each day about violence to my family. I live in a democracy.

The trouble with messages such as ‘we are the 99%’ is that there exists huge disparity and diversity even within that figure. It comes across as mass individualistic protesting, with focus and definition provided by grouping around negative slogans rather than positive action. Whilst the 1% should be questioned and challenged, we all need to be doing more to create a fairer, more equitable society. Let’s not get carried away by political reductionism and slogans. We can do better than that. It’s trivially easy to retweet something or join a Facebook group, but what are we (myself included) actually doing over and above this to make this world a better place? I can’t help but think that marching and camping out isn’t enough any more. What (and where) are we building?

Image CC BY-NC Occupy Global