The Guardian Teacher Network published my piece on the purpose of education yesterday. I like to experiment with new formats, so the whole piece is made up of questions – much like Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood: a novel?

I’d be interested in your comments over there (I’ve turned them off here to encourage you to do so!)

Many things can be automated these days using sites such as ifttt. If you haven’t discovered this website yet, click on the link and say goodbye to the rest of your morning/afternoon/evening. You’re welcome.

For the past year or so I’ve been used to using something called gdz.la to connect Twitter with Flickr. Instead of using TwitPic or, now, Twitter’s built-in service, I pointed my ‘Image API endpoint’ to gdz.la and my photos would show up in my Flickr stream. The flic.kr link to the image would then be appended to my tweet. Awesome.

But.

In their infinite wisdom, Twitter took this functionality out of the latest version of their official iOS client:

(click to enlarge)

Disappointed Doug was disappointed.

All was not lost, however. I asked (via TweetDeck – the Adobe Air version, as Twitter’s HTML5 version sucks) my Twitter network which iOS client they used. The response was many and varied, but a significant number of people recommended TweetBot. Enough for me to pay £1.99 for an app that provides similar functionality I can get for free.

To cut a long story short, TweetBot allows you to define a custom Image API endpoint:

(click to enlarge)

Happy Doug is now happy.

The e-book is going to be called The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies and I shall be employing the OpenBeta publishing model I pioneered a couple of years ago with #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

Invest now for £1 and get each chapter as it is completed FREE!

Can’t see anything above? Click here!

What are ‘digital literacies’? Why are they important? How can I develop them both personally and in other people? These are some of the questions that ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies by Doug Belshaw seeks to address. Informed by his doctoral thesis and experience as an educator, ‘The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies’ Doug is producing a timely resource for those who are interested in both the theory and the practice of digital literacies!

FAQ:

When are you going to finish this?

It depends on many things, but here’s my proposed timescale:

• v0.2 – April 2012
• v0.4 – June 2012
• v0.6 – August 2012
• v0.8 – October 2012
• v1.0 – December 2012

I’m erring on the conservative side here. I’d rather under-promise and over-deliver!

In what formats will the book be available?

The OpenBeta version will be available in iPad-friendly (and reasonably Kindle-friendly) PDF format. The finished version will be available in the following forms:

• PDF
• Kindle
• ePub
• (Paperback/Hardback depending on demand)

How much will the final version be?

£10 – around $15/16 at the current exchange rate

(this is subject to change without notice)

I still don’t understand the OpenBeta process?

More here, but this should help:

How long will the book be altogether?

I’m envisaging each chapter being about 1,000 words, so about 11,000 in total. This is subject to change when I start writing but it will be at least 10,000 words.

Are there any refunds? How do I know you will complete it?

No refunds, but I have managed to write several e-books before and have much more free time now I have completed my thesis! You can always wait until it’s finished, but that will cost more…

Image in book cover CC BY { pranav }

Got a different question? Ask it in the comments below!

My latest blog post for DMLcentral is now online: Conferences as Catalysts for Educational Innovation and Change.

A select morsel:

The face-to-face nature of conferences is, I believe, of even more importance in an extremely digitally connected world. Whilst it’s often the case that you can get to know people very well online, there’s something about embodied interaction that makes your knowledge of that person three-dimensional. I don’t think one method of interacting is necessarily ‘better’ than the other; a blended approach is best. This, I suppose, is why social media is so popular.

In addition, my opinion on Apple’s new iBooks Author was quoted on the JISC site this week. However, they mistakenly listed me as a ‘practising teacher’.

That little slip made me realise just how much I miss it…

I suppose it’s kind of like zero-based budgeting:

In zero-based budgeting, every line item of the budget must be approved, rather than only changes. During the review process, no reference is made to the previous level of expenditure. Zero-based budgeting requires the budget request be re-evaluated thoroughly, starting from the zero-base.

So if I was starting again, knowing what I do now, what would I need?

Everyday bag

• Laptop (+charger)
• Mobile phone (+charger)
• Kindle (+charger)
• Headphones
• Notebook
• Pens
• Bank cards, library card, gym card, passport, etc.
• Card case

Clothes

• Shoes
• Trainers
• Thick socks
• Coat
• Underwear x7
• Jeans x2 (+belt)
• Trousers (+belt)
• Shorts
• Shirts x3
• Jacket
• T-shirts x5
• Swimming shorts (+goggles)

Health/hygiene

• Towel
• Sports towel
• Contact lenses
• Glasses
• Flannel
• Migraine medication
• Inhalers x2
• Toothbrush
• Toothpaste
• Multivitamins
• Deodorant
• Moisturiser
• Razor/beard trimmer (+charger)

My aim with #divest12 isn’t to go ultra-minimalist, but rather to reflect upon what is absolutely necessary to maintain my current lifestyle.

58 items, I reckon.

Have I missed anything?

Michelle Levesque asked for feedback on this: Mozilla’s Web Literacy Skills (v0.1 alpha). I wanted to respond as soon as possible as I think she’s done some great work here.

I’ve visualised the text in her post and then tweaked it slightly to suggest the direction I’d take it:

Click through for a larger version on Flickr.

Changes:

• Added ‘participation’ to Exploring
• Changed ‘bullshit’ to ‘crap’ to avoid offending some people’s sensibilities
• Changed ‘Restaurant HTML’ to ‘HTML basics’ in Authoring
• Combined two blocks to form ‘Reacting to stimulii’ in Building
• Removed ‘Receipe’ize tasks’ in Building
• Added ‘Civil liberties’ to Protecting
• Segmented sections into what would form a ‘Basic’ and an ‘Advanced’ badge’

What do you think? What have I (we) missed?

(if you like this you may also be interested in The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies)

Just look at this:

But it’s difficult, isn’t it? You collect things that are necessary at some point in your life (or that you desire) and then end up hanging on to them. Usually the reason we do this is because they have monetary and/or emotional value.

Back in 2009 I decided to spend a week ‘divesting’. Amongst other things I got rid of hundreds of CDs and books as well as really focusing on the software and hardware I use day-to-day. It was a liberating feeling getting rid of so much. I realised that, in effect, I was a librarian for my books rather than a reader of them. The relationship was the wrong way around. The same went for CDs, DVDs, and other stuff I owned.

Now fast-forward to last week when I ready about Andrew Hyde’s extreme minimalism. Never mind 100 things or 50 things, he owns 15 things. Yes, fifteen. Here’s his ‘floorderobe’:

If what I’m doing is the thin end of the wedge, this is very much the thick end of it!

I suppose the question everyone wants to ask is What counts as ‘one thing’?

The “rule” of ownership is the express-lane checkout rule. If you were checking out in a grocery store, what would be counted as one item in your bag? A six-pack of beer would be one, right? I count my things as resellable items I would be pissed if someone took.

Coffee cup? No. Jacket? Yes. iPhone and headphones? One thing. Simple enough?

Whilst 15 things is not my ultimate goal, I am making a conscious start to declutter and divest. Yesterday alone I took two bin bags full of clothes to the recycling bank, identified 52 books from my study to get rid of, and made an inventory of my electronic gadgetry with a view to consolidating.

I’d like to:

• Reclaim some physical space
• Feel less of a ‘curatorial’ burden
• Be less concerned about the monetary value of my stuff

Want to join me? Add a comment below, write about it on your own blog or just use the #divest12 hashtag on Twitter or Google+!

Image CC BY Andrew-Hyde

Earlier this week the Guardian Higher Education network published something of mine as Resurrect computer science – but don’t kill off ICT. I had originally given it the title In defence of digital literacies as I didn’t want the focus to be upon Computer Science vs. ICT.

C’est la vie.

There’s some interesting and useful comments – and the opposite of that – on the Guardian site. Please do contribute if you’ve got something constructive to add!

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/jan/24/digital-literacy-in-school

(I also attended #LWF12 this week and have written up my thoughts on it here)

To find a new enlightening and inspiring idea (as distinct from finding a recipe for getting safely through the peer-built barricade), browsing through thousands of journal pages is all too often called for. With my tongue in one cheek only, I’d suggest that were our Palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would still be sitting in caves… (Zygmunt Bauman)

In my previous posts on academic journals I’ve compared them unfavourably – either explicitly or implicitly – with the kind of informal ‘peer review’ that happens through blogs and social media. Some commenters have assumed that this means that, like Bauman (see above) I’m completely against peer review. I’m not.

Peer review is valuable. In fact, it’s so important we need a (re)new(ed) academic ecosystem to protect it.

I’m all for new systems such as hypothes.is which provides an open, distributed peer review layer for the web. Although I don’t want to go into it in too much depth here, academia is one of the few unreformed areas with outdated power structures and glass ceilings.

As Stephen Thomas pointed out in the comments to my previous post, academic journals have, and still do, play an important role in both establishing precedent and providing a quality filter. This is important (most of the time).

But, as Dan Meyer pointed out in the quotation making up the bulk of my first post in this series, it’s the edifice that’s built upon the academic journal system that’s problematic:

The incentive seems strange to me… I don’t understand this brass ring I’m chasing. (Dan Meyer)

This academic edifice is built upon other perceived ‘advantages’  of academic journals, including:

• Dissemination of work
• Status
• Career progression
• Contact with others inside and outside field

Academics, unfortunately, have ended up inventing a stick with which they can be beaten. In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a crude instrument looking a research outputs. Career progression (and therefore status) depends upon disseminating work in journals that are, all too often, closed and paywalled.

Part of the answer, I agree, comes through academic journals becoming open access. That’s a step in the right direction (even if it does smack a little of Henry Ford’s ‘faster horses‘). Going further, something more like Alan Cann’s experiments around open peer review could work. But, realistically, we need something a bit more radical. 

How can we save peer review whilst democratising and reforming higher education?

I leave you with the words of Frances Bell, who commented on my previous post:

What I suspect is that more research needs to be done on how, for example. scholarly societies can support research, scholarship and practice in a digital age. (Frances Bell)

Amen to that.

So how did academic journals come about?

Until the late seventeenth century, communication between scholars depended heavily on personal contact and attending meetings arranged by the early learned societies (e.g. the Royal Society). As the membership of these societies increased, more people could not attend the meetings and so the Proceedings, usually circulated as a record of the last meeting became a place to publish papers that had not been presented at the meetings at all and moved towards what we now recognise as scholarly journals. (Wells, 1999)

So journals are a replacement for personal contact.

Are they good for anything else? Brown (1997) cites the following:

1. distributed (many copies are stored in many places)
2. scholars trust and understand the system
3. journals have prestige built up over many years
4. portable and easy to read

Which of the above benefits either (a) cannot, or (b) are not currently able to be replicated by another system?

Some would argue that an important difference between (for example) a blog post and a journal article is that the latter has been formally peer reviewed.

However, as even the editor of The Lancet points out:

The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong. (Horton, 2000)

Just how big do the cracks in the ivory tower have to get before the whole edifice tumbles?

Odlyzko (September 1997) points out that there was an “extensive resistance to print by scholars” in Gutenberg’s time which included calls to ban the new technology because only trash was getting into print and books were not as durable as parchment. The reaction to the Web of today’s scholars has largely echoed the reaction of scholars to the printing press in the 15th century. (Well, 1999)

Is the only reason we persist with journals and their articles is because they provide a convenient means to weigh the pig?

Image CC BY-NC-SA Lal Beral

References:

Brown, S.A. (1997). Scholarly publishing using electronic means : a short guide. Newcastle: Northumbria University

Horton, R. (2000). “Genetically modified food: consternation, confusion, and crack-up”. MJA 172(4), p.148–9

Wells, A. (1999) ‘Exploring the development of the independent, electronic scholarly journal.‘ Sheffield: University of Sheffield