bellblog | Frances Bell

Frances Bell

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Language, Politics and #OER17

This blog post started life as a comment on Martin Weller’s post about language and how it affects behaviour and thoughts in Edtech. The comment mysteriously disappeared as I posted it so I thought that I would repost it here and link from Martin’s post. The title of the post “Let’s think inside the box“…

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…

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…

#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…