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The Digital Library of the Unaffiliated: Workaround practices

The practical bit of this post is about my workarounds to get articles online that are behind paywalls. Scroll down a bit if you want to cut to the chase. For about 30 years off and on I was affiliated to a university, and appreciated the access to books, journals and other resources that accompanied…

It depends – Contexts for copyright, patents and licensing #OER17

Reading posts on variations of Creative Commons licensing by Alan Levine, Doug Belshaw , and Maha Bali really made me think about our practices of licensing, copyrighting and attributing creative works, particularly of what we share as ‘knowledge’. Alan describes the various CC licenses he has used for his photos on Flickr, and the trials…

Personal is Political – a frame for thinking about Open Educational Practice

The OER17 Call for Contributions is about to be released but we already know something the theme of the 2017 conference, entitled The Politics of Open, chaired by Josie Fraser and Alek Tarkowski. OER16 was my first OER conference and I loved its friendly atmosphere, and of course I learned a lot too. The theme…

Is Education Technology a Discipline? and does it matter?

Discipline by Brendan Lynch CC BY-NC 2.0 I noticed the recent discussion on whether or not Education Technology is a discipline at Martin Weller’s blog post. When I read the article that prompted the whole EdTech as discipline discussion, I wondered what was behind the claim that a discipline was emerging. As Georgetown University prepares…

A memory thanks to Seymour Papert

Papert’s death this week crossed my timeline in Maha Bali’s blog post and Audrey Watters’ newsletter No.173. I wondered when I had first heard of Seymour Papert. I remember studying Piaget’s work on my PG Certificate of Education course at the University of Liverpool in 1987/88 but can’t recall studying the work of Papert, his…

Protected: Two views of ‘community is the curriculum’

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Participant association and emergent curriculum in a MOOC: can the community be the curriculum?

Prueba 001 by Magdalena Lagaleriade CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Our third and final paper from research in the context of the Rhizo14 MOOC has been published in the open access journal of the Association for Learning Technology: Bell, F., Mackness, J., & Funes (2016) Participant association and emergent curriculum in a MOOC: can the community be…

Please pause for thought

Two political posts in 3 days – evidence of my distress. This is a copy of an email I have just sent to the Labour Party tom@tom-watson.com theteam@labour.org.uk northwest@labour.org.uk Things are moving so fast that my feedback may be too late but I think it’s important to record it. I was abroad the month before…

Processing our grief and looking to the future

Yesterday when I heard the EU Referendum result, my feelings moved from dread to grief, and I am hopeful that writing this post will be therapeutic for me. I’d be delighted if anyone wants to respond. Part of my philosophy is that we can learn from mistakes so surely there is something to be learned…

Possible futures for innovation and technology in Higher Education

Kate Bowles wrote an interesting post about how she responded to students’ enthusiasm to use Slack and how it worked out well for her and a group of students in thinking about critical narrative professionalism. I’ve never used Slack but I have heard many good reports of it. Her lovely story of “the everyday nature…