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The perfect non-technical book on decentralisation?

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This morning on Mastodon I asked:

If you were looking to write the perfect non-technical book on decentralisation, what would you include?

There were some great replies and I’m not going to do justice to them all here, but I want to summarise below some responses that I hope to return.

If I do get around to writing some or all of a book like this, I envisage it will have discrete, overlapping chapters like Anything You Want by Derek Sivers or 33 Myths of the System by Derek Allen. As a few people said, it’s probably best not to put ‘decentralisation’ in the title if it’s meant for a general audience.

My thanks to all who took the time to respond!

This post is Day 10 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Notes and comments on ‘Digital Badges in Education’: Part I: Trends and Issues

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Digital Badges in EducationLast month, a new book came out entitled Digital Badges in Education: Trends, Issues, and Cases. At over £30, it’s the most expensive book I’ve purchased for a while, but thought it would provide some useful insights. And no, there’s no chapter from me in it: I seem to remember a call for contributions going out last year but I don’t work for free / less than my minimum day rate.

Over my discours.es blog I’ve been making notes on each chapter as I read it. So far I’ve completed Part I: Trends and Issues. As you’d expect from an edited collection, it ranges from the average to the excellent. One curious omission is an introduction from the editors.

The links below reference the titles of each chapter in Part I of the book. However, when you click through, you’ll notice that I’ve given my blog posts a different name. These, of course, are my own notes, highlights, and (in some cases) criticisms of the authors’ work.

Part I: Trends and Issues

  1. History and Context of Open Digital Badges by Sheryl L. Grant
  2. Badges and Competencies: New Currency for Professional Credentials by Anne Derryberry, Deborah Everhart, and Erin Knight
  3. The Case for Rigor in Open Badges by Richard E. West and Daniel L. Randall
  4. Competency-Based Education and the Relationship to Digital Badges by Rhonda D. Blackburn, Stella C.S. Porto, and Jacklyn J. Thompson
  5. Good Badges, Evil Badges? The Impact of Badge Design on Learning from Games by Melissa L. Biles and Jan L. Plass
  6. The Impact of Badges on Motivation to Learn by Samuel Abramovich and Peter S. Wardrip
  7. What Video Games Can Teach Us About Badges and Pathways by Lucas Blair
  8. Instructional Design Considerations for Digital Badges by Chris Gamrat, Brett Bixler and Victoria Raish
  9. Badging as Micro-Credentialing in Formal Education and Informal Education by Kyle Peck, Kyle Bowen, Emily Rimland and Jamie Oberdick
  10. Digital Badges, Learning at Scale, and Big Data by Barton K. Pursel, Chris Stubbs, Gi Woong Choi, and Phil Tietjen
  11. In the Eye of the Beholder: The Value of Digital Badges by Zane L. Berge and Lin Y. Muilenburg

I hope you find this useful! I’ll work on Part II next week.

An update on ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies’

Posted on by Doug Belshaw
The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, ever since finishing my Ed.D. thesis in 2012 I’ve been working on an iterative e-book called The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies. I’m excited to announce that I’m planning to launch v1.0 on 27th June 2014.

This is an ‘iterative’ e-book because people have been able to buy into it ever since v0.1. You can find more about this ‘OpenBeta’ model here. Fundamental to the process is getting feedback from readers. I’m glad to say that you haven’t let me down, and the book is better as a result. Thank you for that.

The aim is for the e-book to be practically useful while not being shy about theory. People have said that it’s proving useful for use with trainee teachers and other undergraduates, so I’m glad it’s already having the desired effect!

My plans for getting to a v1.0 release of The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies are as follows:

27th May
Release v0.99 of the e-book. This will be textually complete and form the basis of a crowdsourced copyediting process that will take a few weeks.

27th June
Release v1.0 of the e-book. This will have benefitted from more eyes than just mine in terms of coherence and copyediting. Should they agree, these people will be given special thanks in the foreword. It will definitely be available in PDF, and I’ll work with people to get it available in ePub and Kindle formats.

Ongoing
I’m not the only conduit for ideas in this space, so I’m planning to follow the lead of people like Yochai Benkler and create a wiki to accompany the book. This will be structured in a similar way to the wiki that is a companion to Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks.

A few points to finish off.

  1. Now is be a great time to buy into the book. It’ll save you a couple of pounds compared to the price of v0.99 or v1.0 (you get the updates for free).
  2. This was never about the money. Yes, I’ve been able to pay recurring digital subscriptions from my Paypal balance instead of my credit card, but that wasn’t the aim. The financial element here was to get people to buy into the process early. Once this happened, I could ask for feedback – which I’m delighted to have received on a fairly regular basis.
  3. If you’d like to get involved with the launch, please do get in touch! Examples: the visual design of v1.0, translating the book into another language, or making Bitcoin payments a reality. I’m @dajbelshaw or you can email me at [email protected].

A special thanks once again to those who have encouraged me and provided feedback over the last couple of years. You’re all very kind. We’re nearly there – just this last hurdle to clear!

More on this next week with the release of v0.99. 🙂

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