On Monday 3rd October 2011 I submitted my doctoral thesis to Durham University. After successfully defending it in my viva voce and making some minor changes, I graduated in April 2012.
I wrote my thesis in the open, on a wiki at neverendingthesis.com which now redirects here. The thesis has a CC0 license which means I have donated my work to the public domain.
Just before graduating, I had the opportunity to give an overview of the findings from my doctoral work in a TEDx talk at the University of Warwick. This was an important opportunity for me to explain complex things in a simpler way.
Subsequently, I rewrote and updated my thesis as an ebook entitled The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies with v1.0 being finished by mid-2014. This has been used as a set text on postgraduate courses in (to my knowledge) Canada, the UK, and Australia.
These three artefacts: my thesis, ebook, and TEDx talk are collected at the top of this page, and also together on the Internet Archive. A snapshot of the wiki on which I wrote and originally published the thesis can be found here.
I continue to consult and present on digital literacies and am particularly interested in how disinformation is propagated online — as I discussed in a keynote entitled Truth, Lies, and Digital Fluency (2019). I also wrote a report for Bonfire Networks which explored ways of Countering Misinformation in Federated Social Networks (2022).
More recently, I have (inevitably) been looking at "AI Literacy" and have done some work in the area, collated at ailiteracy.fyi. I also co-authored a report entitled Supporting AI Literacies for Young Adults Aged 14-19 (2025) for the Reponsible Innovation Centre for Public Media Futures, which is hosted by BBC R&D.
I consult and advise on digital and AI literacies through my business, Dynamic Skillset.
⬅️ Back