What is ‘digital literacy’?
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Some of the best non-institutional feedback I received came in June 2011 as a result of posting that I had completed a first draft of my thesis.80 Two comments on this went into detail about Chapter 6, my methodologies chapter. Although the example below shows that the commenter wished to remain anonymous, I have his email address (from a German university) through which I thanked him privately: 
I took on board this feedback along with other comments. As Dave Cormier, a Canadian academic commented via Twitter:81 
Something that proved hugely popular this year are the slides for a presentation I uploaded to Slideshare based on Chapter 9 of this thesis. 82 I called the presentation The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies and delivered it virtually at 3am in the morning to a conference in Australia. As my daughter had been ill, I did not want to be away for up to a week. I also began to blog at DMLCentral83, a MacArthur Foundation-funded hub based at the University of California Humanities Research Institute for research into digital media and learning. This website has a large readership and presence in the digital literacies landscape and so, when I included my Essential Elements presentation into a blog post in late August 201184 it sent the number of views on Slideshare to almost 5,000. In my role at JISC infoNet I am, as I prepare to submit this thesis, gearing up to support a new JISC-funded Digital Literacies programme across 12 Further and Higher Education institutions. My Essential Elements presentation and sharing of my thesis online has been picked up as a useful starting point by projects in the burgeoning community of practice:85 
As I prepared the Essential Elements presentation for a particular conference, I am now working on a series of resources, in addition to my JISC work, to help educational institutions (from Primary schools through to Higher Education institutions) think through the issues involved in implementing initiatives around digital literacies. As I mentioned in my preface, this is a lived thesis. Whilst I have forgotten the details of many of the interactions that have shaped my thinking and writing, I am glad that I have captured at least part of it through blog posts and presentations. If I have any emerging reputation or status within the arena of digital and new literacies it is due, to a great extent, to those who have provoked my thinking and entered into debate with me. It is also in part due to my willingness to dismiss ‘intellectual property’ and to share my ideas and work openly and widely. I am a great believer in sharing works-in-progress and ‘failures’, times when a plans did not quite work out as intended. It is my hope that this thesis should serve as an encouragement and example to those who are interested in sharing their work more openly.
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