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):
- The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies (#digilit)
- Commoditising learning through the #flippedclassroom (or, the difference between education and training)
- How I Use a MacBook Pro (May 2011)
- The Digital Native/Immigrant dichotomy.
- Project Reclaim: or, how I learned to start worrying and love my data.
- Semester of Learning: Open Badges and assessment
- What would a post-test era look like for our schools?
- Read the first complete draft of my doctoral thesis on digital literacies.
- 5 free, web-based tools to help you be a kick-ass researcher.
- 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):
- Spending time with family.
- 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.
- Avoiding social networks. Yes, even Twitter. And Google+, Facebook. The lot.
- Not blogging. Or moderating comments.
- 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.
- Playing Battlefield 3. What an epic game!
- Migrating web hosts. I’m sick to death of Bluehost. They used to be great, but now they’re slow and unreliable.
- 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
