learning | Frances Bell

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…

Protected: Two views of ‘community is the curriculum’

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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…

Measuring and Correction

I attended my first quilting class today at the Quilting Box and this is what I achieved. I have done some quilting over the years, and been quite pleased with what I have achieved but I knew I had a lot more to learn – I just didn’t quite know what. Textile crafts have so…

Connection and Locus of Control

These are some very half-formed thoughts that I want to capture so I can re-connect and learn more later. I have just read a post by Laura Goglia about an experience she had in school from reading part of a textbook when she was supposed to be reading Beowulf. She saw a picture that fascinated…

The tea cosy that taught me – a story about knitting and learning

I am a fairly unprolific knitter who loves knitting. I do knit repeats of things I have knitted before, like the berry hat and Saartje bootees that I have knitted for many babies of those connected to me. But what I really like in a new knitting project is a…

Women making social media work for good causes

On International Women’s Day I would like to highlight the work of three women doing good with the help of social media and those who participate. Kate Granger is a witty and engaging woman doctor who has used her experience of being a patient with terminal cancer to launch a campaign that has made life…

Revealing and celebrating learning beyond education

Note: this blog post is written to accompany a Twitter chat 8-9p.m. GMT, Wednesday 11 February 2015, follow #LTHEchat Figure 1 What am I thinking? Dave Young https://www.flickr.com/photos/dcysurfer/4928601429 CC BY 2.0 Learning often wears an invisibility cloak. It’s not even that we think it’s magic, but rather that it happens in the course of other…

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’…

Ravelry: a knitting community as a site of joy and learning

“That lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne “ The Parliament of Fowls by Geoffrey Chaucer Evidence that learning starts in the womb is revealed when babies hear lullabies that they will respond to after birth; and learning continues throughout life, as Chaucer says of love. We can all remember from an early…