All the blog | Frances Bell | home at last – for all the mes

Starting our Adventure

dh Terry and I have started our month-long trip in Max Headroom to Netherlands, Germany, Denmark (briefly ), ferry to Iceland (for 2 weeks), Faroes (3 days). It’s all very exciting. The highlight of our trip is visiting family but I know we’ll have many adventures along the way. We left our rainy and overgrown…

Welcome to Frances Bell – home at last for all the mes

How I got here I started blogging in 2006 with Elgg and moved to my own hosted site at francesbell.com when elgg.net disappeared, but with enough warning for me to back up. All was well for 5 years, except that I wasn’t good at backing up and my ISP was a crook. One day, my…

#OER16 Can we imagine tech Infrastructure as an Open Educational Resource? Or, Clouds, Containers, and APIs, Oh My!

Jim Groom kicked off his keynote by saying that he intended not to talk about DS106 but then acknowledged it was his life. His next confession was that he didn’t do any OER and felt alienated from American model of using Open to lower costs of textbooks, meanwhile diverting funding away from public education. Jim…

#OER16 Open Education Special Interest Group OESIG

ALT host the OESIG #openedsig (but you don’t have to be a member of ALT to join). Viv Rolfe @vivienrolfe opened up the discussion. It was suggested that OESIG join forces with #OERHub and collate and curate existing resources; and promote http://wikieducator.org/GoOPEN for use and development. Archivist advised use of open software that allowed for…

Web Today, Gone Tomorrow: How can we ensure continuing access to OERs? #OER16

This panel from Vivien Rolfe, David Kernohan, Lorna Campbell, Pat Lockley, Simon Thompson and Leo Havemann explored in different ways how OERs can be sustained. The panel kicked off with a video from Pat Lockley @patlockley, in character as Alex from Clockwork Orange moving on to the decline of OER production, access and use as…

Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education #OER16

The session at 11.30 – 1 p.m. on Tue, Apr 19 2016 was on the theme Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education Wikimedia UK, cultural heritage and education The first presentation was by Lucy Crompton-Reid and Josie Fraser @josiefraser who spoke about the roles of Wikimedians of Residence and models for…

If ‘open’ is the answer, what is the question? #OER16

Catherine Cronin’s keynote was the first session at the OER16 conference and was live streamed with a video recording here in case you missed it, and an audio recording here, if you like to multi-task. Catherine started a conversation around the subject of the keynote more than a month before at her blog and #OER16…

Institutional fragility and resilience?

Individuals, networks and institutions – in their impossible triangle of resilience My very lovely slice of the Interwebz has thrown up lots of interesting ideas about how all of us can (and can’t) take care of ourselves and each other, and how institutions respond to the idea that there might be a problem in caring…

Failing gently but travelling hopefully at #western106 #ds106

Confession time: This is the second time I have tried to join in with a DS106 class and it’s not going much better than the first time when I sank without trace. I have tried to follow the guidance but am not doing very well at ‘keeping up’. I am determined not to be downbeat…

Bowie and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy #DS106 #Western106

Two things happened today: one momentous, one not so. First, David Bowie died, unexpectedly for us but not for him and his family. Like many other people stunned by his loss, I started to root around the Internet and found lots of gems, some that sparked memories and others that were new. The less momentous…