Politics | Frances Bell

Frances Bell

home at last – for all the mes

A letter I sent to my Macclesfield MP today

Dear Mr Rutley, You are my MP (I live at XXXXXXXX) and whilst I did not vote for you, I have no reason to doubt your integrity. Also, I understand that you served as a government whip until recently. You are in a good position to understand the responsibilities shouldered by those who seek to…

Singing, Acting and Listening across Generations

MUSE – Cincinnati’s Women’s Choir sing They’ll all Sing Bread & Roses Please listen to this lovely song from a beautifully diverse choir as you read what follows. Having been involved in leafletting and campaigning for Labour in Macclesfield over the last few weeks, I sensed that a Labour victory was becoming ever more elusive…

Digital Trespass and Critical Literacy #OER17

Peter Riley explains the Kinder Scout Trespass that took place in 1932 as a protest against the permanent closure of all the wild uplands of Derbyshire for about 12 days of grouse shooting in the year. It has been described as “the most successful direct action in British history” Lord Roy Hattersley, 2007. The other…

A balanced complaint

I caught part of a BBC2 documentary, Trump’s America a Newsnight Special, last night and was appalled by what I saw. From my armchair I tweeted, and it seems a few people saw my tweets but they didn’t seem to make much of a difference except that I probably felt a bit better for having…

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“…

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…

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…