research and scholarship | Frances Bell

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…

Articles – reading, annotating, summarising

Jeffrey Keefer has inspired me to join in his little adventure in reading more articles in the company of others. I am going to try to contribute to Jeffrey’s and others’ experiences whilst making it work in some way for me. My contributions will have a thinkaloud element to aid reflection, and I hope to…

Stars in the playground and hearts in the factory

This week the switching of the star/favorite for the heart/like has been a source of a little sadness for many in my slice of Twitter. Laura Gogia and Maha Bali supplied interesting commentaries on views expressed in ‘academic Twitter’ but I felt a little distant from the angst. Although I don’t have active plans to…

Openness in Cultural Heritage and Education – open standards, open access and open software

When I attended the DCDC15 Conference – DISCOVERING COLLECTION DISCOVERING COMMUNITIES in October, I was struck by the potential for the Cultural Heritage and Open Education communities to learn from each other. I was particularly interested to hear about the Digital Bodleian Library that uses the IIIF standard and is based on open standards, open…