Rhizo14 | Frances Bell

Frances Bell

home at last – for all the mes

Protected: Two views of ‘community is the curriculum’

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Arguing the case for qualitative research on learner experiences

Reading Simon Ensor’s article in Hybrid Pedagogy about the paper Jenny Mackness and I wrote about Rhizo14 reminds me that I made a promise to Simon and others, a promise that I haven’t kept. I said back in March that I would respond to some of the criticisms that Simon and others made of…

Are we there yet? the notyetness of emerging technologies practice and research in online learning

Any parent will recognise the plaintive question “Are we there yet?” asked by children impatient for the journey to be over, the holiday to start. In using technology in learning and education, hopefully we will never really get there but experience fun in our experiments and learn from our experiences. We may find that there…

Open Access and Social Media: Networking around a scholarly article

(The short version is in the last paragraph if you want to skip to there). Heterotopic communication In writing about heterotopic communication (see Foucault’s Heterotopia ), the prescient Leah Lievrouw showed that public and private can relate to strategies for engagement behaviours rather than being properties of spaces (Lievrouw 1998 ). As we communicate apparently…

A table of cMOOCs – can you improve this?

During the course of a research study that Jenny Mackness and I are doing, we have been thinking about cMOOCs. What have been the subjects and purposes of the various courses that might style themselves as cMOOCs? Who does cMOOCs and why? It’s difficult to say what a MOOC is – apart from it being a Massive…

Bobbing along – water as a medium of participation in learning

I spent yesterday finding and reading papers about community learning and MOOCs, and working on our lovely data from #rhizo14. Eventually, I felt that I was going around in circles and decided to search for images to help me make some sense of what I was reading and thinking. I found lots of great ‘water’…

Getting another perspective

This post is a progress report on the research that we (Frances Bell and Jenny Mackness) have been conducting following our participation in the open course Rhizomatic Learning: The community is the curriculum in January 2014. This research to date has included an online survey, email interviews and a conversation with the convenor of the…

Reflections on community in #rhizo14 – more questions than answers

These are some reflections on community in #rhizo14 inspired by the research that Jenny Mackness and I are doing, and my engagement with Maha Bali’s post and the rich comment stream that followed. I just wanted to capture my thoughts as they are currently but would be really pleased to engage through comments. One of the issues that…

Response to Simon Ensor’s comments

Answers by Cavale https://www.flickr.com/photos/cavale/5439074678 CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Jenny Mackness and I are giving a presentation at the MOOCs – which way now event on Friday 27 June. To accompany our presentation (aware that we have too much to cover) we have published a series of blog posts. The first post was – The Rhizome as a Metaphor for…

Ethics and soft boundaries between Facebook groups and other web services

As part of a MOOC on rhizomatic learning that performs itself in many different spaces (Facebook, P2PU, G+, Twitter and others), I am a member of an ‘open’ Facebook group. It is endlessly fascinating, and has given me a lot of scope for reflection about back channels and the exchange of information between open and…