Last week I mentioned in a blog post and my weekly newsletter the pre-launch website of my new (part-time) consultancy Dynamic Skillset. I had an enquiry as to how the site put together, so I put together this screencast:
The great thing about being shown how to do something via video is that, if you get stuck, you can pause, rewind and watch parts again. In this one, I go through the process of downloading a responsive website theme and hosting it for free using GitHub Pages.
Remember, the way to increase your digital and web literacies is to tinker about and try new things. You can’t break anything here and all you have to lose is your GitHub virginity. 😉
PS If you’re interested in using GitHub to ‘fork’ (i.e. remix) someone else’s repository, you may find this video playlist helpful.
Today I reduced the price of my ebook The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies from £7.99 to £5.99. The code gimme10 still works, giving you an extra 10% off!
I just wanted to take a moment to explain the pricing strategy for this work. As regular readers will be aware, I took a couple of years to write this ebook, starting it shortly after I graduated from my Ed.D. in 2012. My thesis was the academic starting point, with my aim to make my research more accessible and applicable to educators and other interested parties.
The first version of the book, v0.1, was literally the title and an indicative contents page. Those who bought the book at this stage were taking a bit of a punt – but were rewarded by getting every subsequent update for free after a small initial outlay. Each subsequent version (v0.2, v0.3, etc.) increased in price until v1.0 was released for £7.99. Doing it this way meant I got some great feedback from early adopters and meant I could shape the book to be as useful as possible.
The book is already Creative Commons licensed but, eventually, I want it also to be free. I’m going to reduce it in price until, two years after publication (~June 2016), it will be free of charge. I’ll make these price reductions approximately every six months.
I’m itching to write another ebook and so am considering a companion workbook to complement The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies. It would probably take the ‘combination of elements’ approach I started to develop a couple of years ago (see slide 40+ of this presentation). I’d love to know your thoughts on this idea in the comments below. Would it be worthwhile? Is it something in which you’d invest?
It’s been three weeks since v1.0 of my ebook, The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies went on sale. 300+ people invested in the book as part of the OpenBeta process and, up to this morning, 121 people have downloaded it via Gumroad (the e-commerce platform).
Last week I met up with former colleague Zak Mensah, now of Bristol Museums at the E-Learning Development on a Shoestring event. He’s quite the ebook guru, and gave me some great tips on how to convert the PDF into ePUB and Kindle formats. I’ll be working on that when I get back from my summer holidays – so from mid-August onwards.
I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed the process of working iteratively and openly on both my thesis (accessed 215,124 times as of this morning) and this ebook. Although important, digital literacies is a bit of a niche subject, so I’m delighted by the interest both have generated.
If you haven’t had a chance to purchase the book yet, the code ‘gimme10’ should still work for a while. Also, I’ve had people contact me about using The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies on a student course, with a MOOC, or with their staff for professional development. If you’re also interested in these kinds of options, do get in touch ([email protected]).
Thanks to everyone who’s invested in the book so far. I very much appreciate your support and feedback – and look forward to seeing the wiki being used increasingly from next academic year onwards!
