learning and education | Frances Bell

Frances Bell

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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…

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…

A memory thanks to Seymour Papert

Papert’s death this week crossed my timeline in Maha Bali’s blog post and Audrey Watters’ newsletter No.173. I wondered when I had first heard of Seymour Papert. I remember studying Piaget’s work on my PG Certificate of Education course at the University of Liverpool in 1987/88 but can’t recall studying the work of Papert, his…

Possible futures for innovation and technology in Higher Education

Kate Bowles wrote an interesting post about how she responded to students’ enthusiasm to use Slack and how it worked out well for her and a group of students in thinking about critical narrative professionalism. I’ve never used Slack but I have heard many good reports of it. Her lovely story of “the everyday nature…

#OER16 Can we imagine tech Infrastructure as an Open Educational Resource? Or, Clouds, Containers, and APIs, Oh My!

Jim Groom kicked off his keynote by saying that he intended not to talk about DS106 but then acknowledged it was his life. His next confession was that he didn’t do any OER and felt alienated from American model of using Open to lower costs of textbooks, meanwhile diverting funding away from public education. Jim…

#OER16 Open Education Special Interest Group OESIG

ALT host the OESIG #openedsig (but you don’t have to be a member of ALT to join). Viv Rolfe @vivienrolfe opened up the discussion. It was suggested that OESIG join forces with #OERHub and collate and curate existing resources; and promote http://wikieducator.org/GoOPEN for use and development. Archivist advised use of open software that allowed for…

Web Today, Gone Tomorrow: How can we ensure continuing access to OERs? #OER16

This panel from Vivien Rolfe, David Kernohan, Lorna Campbell, Pat Lockley, Simon Thompson and Leo Havemann explored in different ways how OERs can be sustained. The panel kicked off with a video from Pat Lockley @patlockley, in character as Alex from Clockwork Orange moving on to the decline of OER production, access and use as…

Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education #OER16

The session at 11.30 – 1 p.m. on Tue, Apr 19 2016 was on the theme Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education Wikimedia UK, cultural heritage and education The first presentation was by Lucy Crompton-Reid and Josie Fraser @josiefraser who spoke about the roles of Wikimedians of Residence and models for…

If ‘open’ is the answer, what is the question? #OER16

Catherine Cronin’s keynote was the first session at the OER16 conference and was live streamed with a video recording here in case you missed it, and an audio recording here, if you like to multi-task. Catherine started a conversation around the subject of the keynote more than a month before at her blog and #OER16…

Institutional fragility and resilience?

Individuals, networks and institutions – in their impossible triangle of resilience My very lovely slice of the Interwebz has thrown up lots of interesting ideas about how all of us can (and can’t) take care of ourselves and each other, and how institutions respond to the idea that there might be a problem in caring…