My Ed.D. is the continuation of an M.Ed. which is itself a continuation of my PGCE at Durham University. I’ve been studying towards it, therefore, for the last six years.

As I explained to my thesis supervisor, I’m not looking to ‘pursue a career in academia’ – well, not a traditional academia at any rate. He called this being ‘outside the tent pissing in’ rather than being ‘inside the tent pissing out’ which was, I suppose, an illuminating metaphor.

I’ve written about 34,000 words (http://dougbelshaw.com/thesis) of the 60,000 maximum that I need to have finished before the end of the 2010/11 academic year. It’s not easy to carve out time to write at the moment with a newborn and kickstarting Purpos/ed (http://purposed.org.uk) but I’m sure I’ll find a way.

I’m committed to publishing my work in an open way which is why I’ve insisted that the upcoming paper on Seven Types of Ambiguity and Digital Literacy I’ve written with my supervisor goes in an open access journal.

So, in term of timescales, I need to have the bulk done by the end of May. I’ll be updating my thesis site as I go along and posting nuggets of research at http://literaci.es