This post is my first personal blog post since deciding to close my previous blog in 2013. At the time, when living in New Zealand, I decided to intentionally use Twitter as an alternative micro-blogging platform rather than finding time on top of a busy day job to maintain a regular and meaningful blog site. I had been blogging for several years before this decision and started using Twitter at the start of 2009. I will leave it to colleagues and other respected educators around the globe to judge whether this new personal blog, Decoding Digital Education, makes a valuable contribution to the field.
Importantly, one of the critical motivations for returning to personal blogging is that I decided to close my Twitter account at the end of 2022. For me, this was a moral decision and an important ethical stance. It was a personal and professional response to Twitter’s new management under a single owner who appears to put profit before people and platform power before the public good and the importance of the digital commons. You have to walk the talk of your convictions, so walking away from Twitter was simply the right thing to do, despite 14 years of active engagement, several thousand followers and over 12,000 posts on the platform.
As my final tweet copied below says…
“This is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.”
While my posts will attempt to add value by looking between the digital bytes, I am genuinely concerned about avoiding this blog being seen as nothing more than a personal vanity project. This is not my motivation as I do not seek more followers. For over a decade, my Twitter account displayed a banner with a quote about leadership stressing the importance of developing more leaders rather than followers. Launching this blog, and a new TikTok channel called @digiedutok, which plans to curate fresh reads in digital education from recently published journal articles, runs the risk of putting ego and edutainment before education.
I’m very conscious of this risk. In grappling with how best to fill the post-Twitter void, I have decided it’s impossible to be neutral. So, rather than being a broker, disseminator and passive consumer of tweet size bytes, it’s time to step out and step up from the relative protection and collective voice of our well-established NIDL blog – Digital Learning Dispatches. I hope to find a personal voice in this blog that keeps my ego in check and balances opinion with substance. I plan to write about various topics and issues across the increasingly contested and burgeoning terrain of digital education with primarily a tertiary focus.
This is the personal challenge I have set myself for 2023, and beyond. I want to find new and better ways of harnessing the transformative potential of digital platforms for professional learning from policy to practice.
I hope some of you will come with me on this journey as I share my musings, critical reflections and professional insights. I don’t expect you will agree with everything I say, as in the spirit of blogging, this is an open place and space for me to think aloud, test my ideas and promote debate on the big and small issues we face in shaping future imaginaries: our ideas about what constitutes the good learner, the good teacher, the good university, the good citizen and the good society.
Mark Brown 
Looking forward to this and the debates that might emerge. Let’s get started. I’m somewhat sceptical about this whole “leadership” idea. It sounds like managers trying to rebrand themselves. As for leaders creating more leaders, that sounds like the ponzi scheme of academic research. Leading implies that you are leading people who I imagine are followers. If everyone becomes a leader, who will they be leading? Each other? (The blind leading the blind suddenly comes to mind). Perhaps the word “leader” is wrong. In Continuous Improvement in manufacturing ideas are encouraged at all levels of the organisation. Innovation can come from anywhere. Perhaps “innovator” is a better word. Everyone can be an innovator and some people can be managers and organise things.
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From time to time we have misunderstandings because someone does not see the difference between “leadership” and “management”…
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