Read the following, taken from a panel session Dan took part in (he’s now a PhD student):

I’m a grad student in my second year and I’ve never shared this with anybody here, least of all my adviser, who’s in attendance, but I don’t understand the incentive structure for what you do and what I may do someday. You write amazing things and you study amazing things and you write them compellingly in journals that are not read by practitioners very often. They affect a lot of policy, which I think is a really good, top-down approach. But then I’m over here and I can post something that’s seen by 10,000 people overnight. That’s the number of subscribers I have to my blog right now. Or any number of these things. So the incentive seems strange to me. Like I don’t understand this brass ring I’m chasing. It seems like a strange prize at the end of a finish line of grad school. So there’s the question and then there’s also the encouragement. You have so many soapboxes available to you. Find a kid like me and ask him how to do a webcast or something. You have so many — and to restrict yourself to peer review, I don’t know. There’s very little upside to me, it seems.

I feel this, and so do many others my age and with similar higher level qualifications.

So what are you (the academy) going to do about it?

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.

Social media platforms, with their inherent hyper-connectivity require the user to hold highly complex multi-dimensional maps of them as social spaces, with many thresholds of differing permeability. It’s a long way from closing-the-front-door type methods of creating privacy boundaries. Some people are very skilled at managing the ‘edges’ of these social maps and manage their digital identities with great skill and to great effect. The rest of us have come to expect occasional moments of disjuncture.

I would argue that our notions of the public and the private don’t yet account for the width of these social thresholds or for the speed at which they can shift. We constantly negotiate the boundaries between the public and the private but we have an expectation that these boundaries, while moving, will remain sharp. The web and especially social media platforms defocus our understanding of these boundaries. Our ability to map and remap our relationship with these social thresholds is a key form of digital literacy, and possibly a new life-skill (if I can call it that).

Dave brings up an important element of digital literacy here: the ability to negotiate multiple spaces, some purely digital and some blended. This will inevitably involve shifts, even subtle ones, in the way that an individual projects themselves into that space. The boundary between this as a ‘literacy’ (reading/writing oneself) and a life-skill is itself blurred, I would suggest.

There is no such thing as reality. There are stories that we tell one another, narratives that gain more or less traction and memetic phrases which help organise our experiences. As soon as such stories become less useful in the way of belief we can (and should) jettison them for ones that work better and that help us make sense of such experiences. That’s the Pragmatic philosophy to which I subscribe.

During times of fiscal instability and uncertainty societies naturally gravitate towards conservatism. This is evident both in the financial conservatism of public sector cuts but also in social conservatism – right down to retro designs in advertising. The 24-hour news industry feeds and catalyses this.

One thing I’ve noticed recently is, as Martin Weller puts it, the beginnings of a ‘backlash’ against newer (and particularly social) technologies:

The signs are that this year will be one marked by something of a backlash against social media/ web 2.0/ any internet stuff. I don’t mean from the traditional media, who’ve always been suspicious, but from people who know what they’re talking about and have been advocates. In other words, increasingly ‘us lot’ will be declaring that this stuff is peripheral, uncool, over- rated, etc.

I’d go further than this. There are always those (who call themselves) ‘thought-leaders’ who aim to be disruptive or, at least, contrarian who are always looking for something that will get them attention. All it takes is for someone to say that they were wrong about technology xyz for a feeding-frenzy of “I told you so” to take place. One competing story amongst many starts to appear ‘legitimate’.

It would seem incomprehensible to my 16 year-old self that I have absolutely no idea who is currently Number 1 in the singles chart. Last Saturday was the first time this season that I’ve watched the football programme ‘Match of the Day’. When it comes down to it all, reality is the coherence-through-storytelling that we paint as a veneer upon shared experience. To my mind, social media is one of the best ways I know to engage in such narratives.

I shall not be participating in the backlash.

Image CC BY-NC-SA daveknapik

Using social media doesn’t make you a guru. Having attended a school doesn’t qualify you to speak on education policy. Working in an organisation doesn’t make you a business leader.

Strategy, not of the crystal-ball-gazing or guessing variety, but of the values-based, focused, considered type, is what separates good from great.

As I mentioned last week, we’ve bought a couple of tents so we thought we’d go camping ASAP to get us in the swing of things. I asked my Twitter network for advice and was so overwhelmed with the (very quick!) responses that I put together a post entitled HOWTO: Go Camping (according to my Twitter network).

Facilitating

Not only did I help facilitate the quarterly JISC infoNet planning meeting on Monday and Tuesday of this week, but I ended up helping out at the Social Media: Are You Ready? event on Wednesday.

The latter event was keynoted by Chris Brogan and used his ‘podcamp’ unconference model. At the beginning of the day (which was slightly delayed due to an accident on the A1) people volunteered to run workshops/deliver presentations/otherwise facilitate conversations.

You know me. A half-second’s silence and awkwardness was all it took for me to facilitate a session (attended by around 30 people) on Acceptable Use Policies and Social Media. I like to challenge myself, so it was an interesting experiment to get the slides and questions ready during Chris Brogan’s keynote. Which I was also live-tweeting…

Marking

I took another couple of days off this week (Thursday and Friday) to get the bulk of my Edexcel GCSE History allocation out of the way. I’m bang on track now to be finished by next Wednesday!

Not working on my thesis

I’ve realised that this month I’ve done virtually no work on my thesis. Part of that is due to my thesis supervisor not getting back to me (despite a reminder!) but it’s also partly to do with work on the OER infoKit coming to an end, attending conferences, and being busy with marking. Must. Do. Better.

Attending the Thinking Digital Conference

I spent Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday and Thursday at the Thinking Digital Conference, recording my thoughts about it here (I haven’t quite finished yet!) It was an awesome event, seemingly expensive but for the quality of ideas and knowledge I went away with, fully worth it!

Rationalising the work/private divide

It’s a tricky one, but I’m trying to get my head around my work interests and personal interests occupying the same space. It’s always been the case, but just a whole lot more obvious (with attendant consequences) in my current role.

Finishing off my first journal article

I’m going to be submitting my very first journal article on the ambiguity of ‘digital literacy’ soon. I’m sending it to my thesis supervisor this weekend to see if he can put his name to it at joint author…

Not selling our house

We’ve decided to take our house off the market. The thought of downsizing, even if transport links are better in Whitley Bay (where we planned to move), didn’t exactly inspire us. Looking around some houses there last weekend sealed the decision.

Selling my MacBook Pro

I decided to sell my 15-inch MacBook Pro this week, along with some other technology stuff I don’t really use or need. Interestingly I’m finding that – as Stammy noted recently – social media such as Twitter can be as good as eBay for selling tech stuff.

Kerry Turner:

Any educator launching into the world of social media has to know its risks.

…

One evening, after reading several posts on Twitter, it was mentioned that school Acceptable User Policies were declaring that all contact with students on social media was to be avoided.

…

There are strong cases for and against its use. Most important is where the very public nature of social media spotlights professional conduct, where it is used as a vehicle for bullying, or presents us with evidence which we might need to flag up or report to a higher authority. Teachers worry that their natural way of conversing; expressing themselves after a frustrating day, or humorous posts about their personal life could compromise their position at work and result in a telling off from a superior. Yet we teach children to mind themselves online. Within reason, do we not need to consider the same? My belief is that as more students and NQT’s are educated about their use of social media, so the number of incidents which have resulted in censure will become less.

(my emphasis)

A solution?

IF “teacher” AND “http://www.google.com/search?&q=teacher” = “unprofessional” THEN “censure”

Goodness knows I’ve tried my best to put together some reasonable Acceptable Use Policies and ‘Digital Guidelines’ in the past. I think that we have to come to terms with the fact that people live increasingly large amounts of their lives connected via social media. So if you’re a teacher, use Twitter and occasionally swear, then protect your updates. If you don’t, and mind what you say, then as you were.

Using Google (or any search engine, for that matter) to search for an educator should bring up positive results on the first page. If it doesn’t, you’re doing something wrong.

After all, anyone can find out something negative or ‘unprofessional’ about a person if they do enough digging. :-p

Below are some quotations from the book in a Flickr set that will eventually grow to include quotations from other authors… :-p

Then, in a post which referenced my recent issues with a certain VLE provider, Will Richardson linked to a presentation by Clay Shirky. For those of you who haven’t heard of Shirky, he’s the Next Big Thing™ after Thomas Friedman. He’s written a book called Here Comes Everybody that I feel I should read this year. Within the first couple of minutes of the presentation, Shirky said something that made me lose track of everything which followed:

Absolutely! I don’t mean by the title of this post that I want educational technology to be ‘boring’ in the sense of it being tedious. No, I mean ‘boring’ in the sense of it being so commonplace and ubiquitous that it isn’t thought about. I want us to get to a stage with all of this Web 2.0 stuff¹ where we’re constantly focused on what we can do with the technology. A bit like wireless networking – at least for most of us… :-p

¹ Tom Barrett’s getting there with his pupils and Google Docs