Tag: digital literacies

An update on ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies’

Posted on May 20, 2014May 20, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

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.

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).
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.
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. 🙂

New to digital literacies? Read this.

Posted on February 25, 2014February 25, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

Earlier today John Sutton asked for my “top few accessible reads overviewing digital literacies”. I was walking my son to his new school at the time, so responded that I would write a quick blog post later. Well, here it is.

Right off the bat I’d go for Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart. It’s wonderfully written by a (gentle) giant of the field. What I like about it is the mix of anecdote and academic research. It really is well put together.

After that, it’s slightly trickier to know where to turn – for a couple of reasons. First, the books in this field tend to be more academic than perhaps they need to be. Second, they’re also more expensive than they need to be. £20 for a text-based book is not my usual idea of money well spent. I’d rather dip into the Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy (available free online) – especially articles like Towards a Transformative Digital Literacies Pedagogy (Thomas, 2011)

Having said that, anyone who wants to get to grips with the field of digital literacies really does need to read Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices. I enjoyed (re-)reading it. You might also want to try James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

I haven’t read everything that’s come out around digital literacies since I finished my thesis, but it’s important to realise that there’s different understanding of what the territory looks like depending upon which sector you’re in (schools, universities, formal/informal) and where you are in the world. The ongoing work of Henry Jenkins is venerated in North America so it’s probably worth reading the free MacArthur report he wrote with some others in 2009: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.

Other than that, and perhaps some work by David Buckingham, it’s difficult to point you towards something specific. There’s some great work by Stephen Downes and by Helen Beetham, but their work is more wide-ranging than just digital literacies. Downes’ excellent presentation Speaking in Lolcats, for example, is almost an hour and a half long. You can find Beetham’s work scattered around the Jisc Design Studio (a wiki).

Finally, while I’m slightly wary of tooting my own horn, I did spend six years looking at the field of digital literacies in my thesis. While that in itself is not as incomprehensible as some academic work, I am (taking my time in writing) a more accessible version of it. It’s an ebook called The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies which you can buy it now (currently at v0.9) and you’ll get v1.0 when it’s finished. I hope that helps John and some other people.

If there’s something I’ve missed that you’d recommend, please do mention it in the comment section below! 🙂

Image CC BY-NC-SA Tyler Wilson

v0.9 of ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies’ now available! [E-BOOK]

Posted on January 6, 2014May 27, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

I’m delighted to announce that the latest iteration of my e-book The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies is now available. This takes us to v0.9!

Those who invested in previous versions have already received their free update, according to the OpenBeta process I devised. Or at least they should have done – ping me if not. 🙂

~~You can invest in v0.9 and then get the update to v1.0 by clicking below:~~

What’s included in this version?

Preface
Contents page
Chapter 2 – What’s the problem?
Chapter 3 – Everything is ambiguous
Chapter 4 – Why existing models of digital literacy don’t work
Chapter 5 – The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies
Chapter 6 – Curiosity created the LOLcat
Chapter 7 – Remix: the heart of digital literacies
Chapter 8 – Coding and the web (*NEW!*)

This means that the book’s main chapters are finished and all that’s left is the introduction and conclusion to write and a bit of copyediting to sort out. If you buy into the book now, you’ll receive the finished version as soon as it’s ready!

Got questions? I might have answered them in this post announcing the e-book!

Header image CC BY-NC-SA Tc Morgan,
book cover background CC BY pranav