research and scholarship

Frances Bell

home at last – for all the mes

Reflecting before #ALTC : Rear view mirror and forward vision

Objects in Mirror are closer than they appear by Aniket Thakur CC BY 2.0 In preparation for our interactive presentation at ALTC 2018 A personal, feminist and critical retrospective of Learning (and) Technology, 1994-2018, Catherine Cronin and I are sharing blog posts of our personal and feminist histories in education and technology that are sometimes…

Ground Zero Approaches to Open #YearofOpen

Whilst I was at the OER17 Conference, via Twitter I became aware of a minor controversy around a post by David Wiley, How Is Open Pedagogy Different? published on April 4, just before OER17. Jim Groom’s response I don’t need permission to be open attracted a lot of comments (30 at time of writing). I…

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…

Intentionality, Cliques and Agency

I read two posts about in/exclusion recently : one from sava singh about cliquenomics; and one from Maha Bali on Intentionality, Community, and When Open Isn’t Open. I really like the way that sava captures an observational view of community and how it can include and exclude. She identifies that although people can have malicious…

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…

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…

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…