participation | Frances Bell

Keep Calm and Carry On – but carefully and differently #OER20

So it has happened – OER20 in London in April has been cancelled. This comes as no surprise but it’s still disappointing not to be meeting up with friends, hearing their ideas and, in my case, meeting some of the people whose beautiful textile art work has arrived at my house in Macclesfield, to be…

#FemEdTechQuilt – Getting There

The FemEdTech Quilt project has been an amazing project and we are not there yet – we have to get not one, but now four quilts to #OER20. The quilt has been in planning since summer 2019, and we launched it in November 2019 in a post at OER20 conference website. It seemed like quite…

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…

Frances with Lorna Campbell and Sheila MacNeill at HLM

Generosity and Generative Processes at FemEdTech and ALT

It was never in my plan to attend ALTC2019 as a delegate. Being generally self-funded, I have to be very selective in attending conferences, and I had already attended the wonderful OER19 in Galway in Ireland in April. I was involved in the ALTC conference as a member of the Programme Committee, and had seen…

Questionably open and not always by choice

In preparing my ALT format piece for OER19, I thought about these questions in the context of my work as a volunteer IT Buddy at my local library in the town of Macclesfield in the North West of England. Why open? Open for whom? Whose interests are served? In what ways has the open agenda…

femedtech Open Space #femedtech

Reblogged from https://oer19.oerconf.org/news/guest-blog-femedtech-open-space-by-lorna-campbell-and-frances-bell/ By Lorna M. Campbell, @lornamcampbell, and Frances Bell, @francesbell One of the real strengths of the OER Conferences is that in recent years they have increasingly facilitated an ongoing critical discourse that seeks to question and renegotiate what openness means to educators, teachers and learners within different contexts and perspectives. This discourse…

Femedtech -curation and what next? #femedtech

Femedtech network at time of writing Femedtech (see brief history) currently comprises a Twitter handle @femedtech and a hash tag #femedtech and a network of great people who engage variously with femedtech. There was some great collaboration in evolving the concept of femedtech – much work done behind the scenes by talented and busy women….

Femedtech – you are invited to a work in progress

In early 20187, building on connections, in some cases friendship, and ideas, a group of women practicing and researching in educational technology launched femedtech – a feminist network for people working in education. It appeared via a Twitter account @femedtech, a hashtag #femedtech and a (now defunct website femedte.ch powered by WordPress) and was very…

You can’t have one without the other

Over the last few weeks on Rhizo14, I have been troubled with the either/or nature of some of our weekly tasks. We could argue about whether or not that was intended but at least some of the students have perceived concepts as being presented in opposition to each other: Cheating as Learning , Enforcing Independence, Is Books…