learning and education | Frances Bell

Becoming part of a family of artists: a journey

This particular journey started in November 2016. I stood at the Colourlicious stall at the Harrogate Knitting and Stitching Show and picked up a sheesham block of a tree (made by an artist in India). I had previously bought another tree block, of a stylised Christmas tree, from which I had made padded tree decorations….

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…

Resistance as a Digital Capability #udicap

Kerry Pinner invited me to give a presentation at the UCISA Spotlight on Digital Capability Conference at University of Warwick. My presentation was based on some work I have being doing on Digital Trespass and Resistance as a Digital Literacy. I approached the UCISA event (my first contact with the organisation) with a slight sense…

What are the literacies of resisting the new norm(al)? #altc

I gave (with the considerable help of the other participants in the room) a 20 minute presentation at ALTC 2017, in the Empowerment in Learning Technology Theme, here is the abstract and here is an autoplay version of the slides There are some speaker notes here that indicate what was said along with the slides. The…

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…

Open by Accident

In 1996, I was lecturing in Information Systems in the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences at University of Salford. A colleague ran a Lotus Notes Server (under his desk as I recall) that hosted a Student Information System – and I had an account on the server for that reason. And then – Lotus…

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“…