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

Last year I took a personal digital hiatus better known as Belshaw Black Ops. I got plenty of stuff done, really appreciating the time out of the constant digital attention stream.

This year I’m planning to do the same for the month of December. It’s slightly difficult given my role at JISC infoNet, but here’s what I’ll be doing (and not doing):

1. Spending time with family.
   
2. Not responding to email. If you email my personal email address you’ll get an auto-response. Other than work-related emails on my JISC accounts, the only other way to contact me is my mobile number. Ask for it if you need it.
3. Avoiding social networks. Yes, even Twitter. And Google+, Facebook. The lot.
4. Not blogging. Or moderating comments.
5. Collating and curating. Change doesn’t come through one person having a good idea. Change comes through ideas being packaged in such a way that they become memes and alter the status quo. I’ll be going back through what I’ve written and created over the past year and thinking through how it connects with other stuff.
6. Playing Battlefield 3. What an epic game!
7. Migrating web hosts. I’m sick to death of Bluehost. They used to be great, but now they’re slow and unreliable.
8. Researching ancient monuments. Visiting Ggantija Temples and Hagar Qim on Malta has rekindled my interest!

Depending on when I have to defend my thesis, I may also need to spend time making clarifications and changes to that. All in all, if you need to contact me, ask my advice, or invite me to speak somewhere, you’ve got four weeks before 2012 to do so…

Image CC BY-NC BaboMike

Years ago, I realized that there was no way to take a vacation and manage the always-on, always-in-contact lifestyle that technology affords. Initially, I thought that it’d be possible to simply ignore email while on vacation and deal with it afterwards but I realized that this was untenable. It takes months to catch up on thousands of emails and I’d come back and immediately burn out again trying to catch up.

She goes on to add that “disappearing without properly making certain that everyone has what they need is irresponsible and disrespectful.” That’s why I’m giving advanced notice that I’m going on a personal digital hiatus from Friday 17th December 2010 until Monday 10th January 2011.

In practice this means that during this period:

• I won’t reply to any email (and any email I do receive will be deleted).
• I’m uncontactable via Twitter.
• I won’t be blogging or moderating comments.

If you need to get hold of me, there’s two options: phone me (if you haven’t got my numbers already, you don’t need them) or contact me at work (until 21st December / after 4th January)

I’ll keep on clipping the occasional article I come across, but I’m intending to swear off Twitter, email and blogging for three weeks, during which time my wife will almost certainly give birth to our daughter. If that isn’t reason enough, I’ll also be doing the following:

1. Getting back into shape. The snow has knocked my exercise regime for six.
2. Producing ‘Best of Belshaw: 2010′
3. Working on my Ed.D. thesis
4. Thinking hard about the future.
5. Spending time with my Dad (back from the UAE for Christmas)

So, if you’ve got something to ask of me, best ask before Friday. Please.

Can you guess which I responded to?

Request 1

You know someone I know. I’m a teacher and we’re trying to do xyz – we’ve tried everything, asked our techies and we’re stumped. Could you help?

Request 2

Doug, I know you’ve said recently on Twitter that you don’t like doing what I’m about to ask, but I’m going to ask anyway. Could you pimp xyz for me? It replicates the functionality of one of the biggest websites in the world but it’s OK because there’s a competition. Perhaps you could add it to ‘Things I Learned This Week’?

Request 3

Can I twist your arm to join in a conversation next week? Here’s a link…

<follows link to Google Doc>

Here’s the plan: I’m asking a bunch of people I know and respect write a guest post each around topic xyz, also posting it on their blog to start a conversation. I won’t edit your post because I trust you.

Guessed yet?

I’ve been wanting to do more video stuff for a while. That’s why I’ve decided to begin two new projects, the first of which is a series called Doug on Productivity which I’ll try to get out every Monday morning (GMT).

In this first episode I answer three productivity-related questions about email, motivation and “writer’s block”.

Got some questions for Episode 2? Add them to the comments either here (below) or over at the YouTube page.

Emails from my mother may usually be important, but something time-sensitive from a person who’s not emailed me before is likely to be even more so.

However much you try to automate these things, get GMail to ‘learn’ your preferences, ultimately it needs human input.

So I’ve turned off GMail Priority Inbox after playing about with it for a few weeks. Interesting concept, but not for me.

Microsoft have, very helpfully, concocted a Fact Based Comparison of Hosted Services (16 May 2010). Unfortunately, it’s rather selective with those facts. Most of them revolve around ‘can you do the same stuff with Google Apps as you can with Microsoft Outlook?’ That’s a flawed question for two reasons:

1. You don’t necessarily want to do the same things with Google Apps.
2. You can use Outlook to connect to Google Apps anyway.

To me, after reading several articles (available at my Delicious account) the choice seems to be between:

• Cloud storage (Microsoft Live@Edu/Office Live)
• Cloud collaboration (Google Apps)

Whilst Microsoft’s offerings allow near real-time collaboration with Excel and OneNote, pages are locked for editing if someone else is using a Word document or PowerPoint presentation. By way of comparison, you can collaborate and edit all of Google Docs’ offerings in real-time.

Lifehacker, a website I’ve used for the last few years, published How Does Office Web Apps Compare to Google Docs? on 16 June 2010. I quote Kevin Purdy, the author of the article:

In terms of real-time collaboration, Google wins hands-down, because Office offers none.

And again:

Google’s Docs offerings have been on the market a good four years now, so they’ve had more time to learn what users want and need in an online suite. It shows in the design and function of Docs for day-to-day users.

I toyed with the idea of producing a point-by-point checklist here to compare Microsoft and Google’s offerings, but I don’t really think there’s any need. It’s a question of attitude and focus. For example, Microsoft drags its heels insisting on Silverlight installation whilst Google looks to the future with HTML5, an emerging web standard.

So, if you always use the same device, deal in only Microsoft-produced documents and are convinced Outlook is God’s gift to email users, then you’ll love Live@Edu and Office Live.

But if, on the other hand, you like to be able to get various kinds of documents in and out of your systems easily, if you need to collaborate (in real-time) with colleagues not physically co-located, and if you want to be able to access everything on whatever device and browser you prefer using, then you’ll love Google Apps.

You can probably tell by the tone of this article which one I prefer. And I make no apology for that. Rome was not built on ‘functional specifications’ but on passion, enthusiasm and dedication. :-p

Sent from my iPhone.

My thinking? They’ll understand why I haven’t written a longer reply. That was my intention.

But the effect? Variously:

• I’ve got an iPhone. You haven’t. Ergo, you suck.
• You’re not important enough for me to spend longer replying to  you.
• I’m busy. Leave me alone.
• I don’t know how to change the default message on my iPhone. Ergo, I suck.

The effect was vastly different to my intention.

So what have I done about it? Replaced it with:

- – - – -

http://bit.ly/dajbelshaw

http://five.sentenc.es

At the top is a shortened link to my Google profile, whilst underneath is a website that states that it is my policy to use no more than five sentences (where possible) to reply to an email.

How does that make the recipient feel now? Is the effect closer to my intention?

I think so.

But what about other times? What about queues? What about unexpected delays?

Howard Rheingold, a bit of a hero of mine, tweeted this yesterday:

I try to see underheads ahead of me in line who fumble for their checkooks, change, as opportunities for mindfulness in the moment …so when I am delayed by circumstances beyond my control, I try to ask myself what I might not be noticing in my environment.

Instead of seeing unexpected delays as being the result of some malevolent ethereal force it’s a much better plan to have an idea of what can fill that time. Some suggestions:

• People-watching (why do people do what they do?)
• Writing down/expanding upon thoughts in a notebook
• Talking to other people (i.e. practising striking-up conversation)
• Pattern-spotting (how many x are there? what does that remind me of?)

Why not checking email/Twitter/other technological things?

You are what you habitually do. (Aristotle)

I’m aiming to become more creative, aware of my surroundings and reflective. Are you?